Preview of the GuildQuality Home Book: GQ for your customers
12/3 Update: The GuildQuality Home Book is now live. Click here to sign up for an account. As a reminder, we’re now field testing an early version of this service. Your feedback will help us work the bugs out and will also inform the way we expand and improve the service.
As we hinted a few weeks ago, we’ll soon privately launch a new service: The GuildQuality Home Book (working title). The GQ Home Book will enable people to easily record all the contractor and project information that relates to their home.
Those that sign up will receive invitations to participate in our private release when we go live with the service.
I’ve received a number of questions about the new service, and what follows is my attempt to answer the biggest ones.
“How much will it cost?”
We’re presently thinking it would be free. We may introduce premium features down the line and the consumer would pay for them, or they might be free to all customers of Guildmembers. We plan to execute it in a way that actively promotes and benefits our members so that the service will be a marketing, selling, and membership retention tool for GuildQuality.
“Who will control the information in the account?”
The consumer would control the information in their house record, and it would be private to them, though they could share it with select people or companies. As with current GQ data, we will probably aggregate the data somehow for the benefit of all users.
“Where did the idea come from?”
For some time, I’ve been thinking about how we can help strengthen the relationship between members and their customers beyond the surveying process. Some time ago, my wife shared with me an article about keeping a “home journal” and that got my wheels turning. I pitched it to a bunch of people thereafter, and they liked it a lot. Then in October, I did a focus group with about a dozen members, and the reception all around was sufficiently positive to prompt us to spend some engineering time on it.
“Why aren’t you launching the Home Book for everyone right now?”
We like to develop things iteratively. That helps us keep projects small with the expectation that we can make improvements as we go along. This also saves us the burden of developing a project for a year, and then launching it only to discover a year’s worth of miscues when we see it operating out in the wild.
The product we have right now is a simple stand-alone service. It includes consumer-facing functionality that lets people record the important stuff that relates to their home. But before we launch publicly, we have a handful of additional things we’d like to add to facilitate the relationship between homeowners and our members.
“How do you intend for it to “facilitate the relationship” between the homeowner and the Guildmember?”
We expect to add at least three things in to the Home Book accounts before we launch publicly.
First is the auto-creation of a Home Book account for people that complete surveys. By automagically creating a survey respondents account, we can auto-populate it with a bunch of relevant project and Guildmember information and save them the hassle of having to enter all that stuff in themselves.
The second is a feed of cool information about the GuildQuality member that is listed in their account. So in addition to tracking things about their home, the user can also see what the member is up to elsewhere. We believe this will help members stay top-of-mind for the homeowner, facilitate additional work in the future, and encourage referrals to friends and family.
Third, we intend to create some interconnectivity between each Home Book and the Guildmembers’ project record inside the existing member accounts. Our members’ will be able to add some things into each Home Book where they are listed as a contractor. Think warranty and service management, special offers and messages for past customers, and a place where both member and customer can record information about ongoing work.
“How does this jive with the GuildQuality mission?”
GuildQuality’s mission is to elevate the stature of the building, remodeling, and real estate profession. We primarily do that with our customer satisfaction surveying by helping our members deliver great service. For the last couple years, we’ve been fueling that effort by celebrating the quality we see in our community — if more people choose great companies to buy from and build with, then fewer people will have bad experiences, and this will strengthen the industry as a whole. The homeowner accounts will provide a platform for the ongoing promotion of the existing relationships formed between members and customers. My thinking is that the customer/contractor relationship shouldn’t end with the sale of the home or the completion of the renovation, and there’s great value for both parties by helping to continue it.
Register for an invitation. Let me know if you’d like to receive an invite to try out the GuildQuality Home Book when we privately launch next week. 12/3 update: We’re now live. Click here to sign up.
Looks like a great idea and I think a wonderful benefit to both the GQ members and their clients.