Quality-minded builders, remodelers, developers and contractors rely on our customer satisfaction surveying to help them provide exceptional service

In this month’s Remodeling Magazine, Ben Morey of Morey Construction and Martha Stinson of Trace Ventures shared how GuildQuality helps them reward and praise excellent service among their teams.

Morey says that perpetuating the client-feedback loop has been one of his “best tools” for maintaining morale and productivity. He shares survey results in meetings, and especially relishes placing printed copies of client comments on employees’ desks.

Thanks Ben and Martha, for sharing!

An interview with Kelly Rulis, Vice President of Customer Satisfaction & Experience for John Wieland Homes & Neighborhoods:

Click here to learn more about GuildQuality and our services for homebuilders, remodelers, contractors, and real estate developers.

For a number of years, GuildQuality has allowed our members to opt-in to our public membership directory. We’re interested in sharing with the world which companies rely on GuildQuality to help them deliver an exceptional customer experience. We believe their membership in our community of quality speaks well of them, and it’s certainly a feather in our cap to be the tie that binds so many exceptional businesses together.

But after a while, a simple list starts to get old. So earlier this week, we introduced the GuildQuality Stream — a feed of all of our members’ published activity. For those Guildmembers who have a public profile, we’re publishing their updates. Those updates include their twitter and blog posts, as well as updates to their GuildQuality listings. And if they’ve published their customer feedback, the updates will include survey response notifications and flagged customer comments.

The result is a stream of interesting activity, updated every hour on the hour. You can view what’s going on all over North America, or zoom all the way in, and look at Charleston only.

While I may be biased, I find it mesmerizing. I am unable to keep from returning to check it out at 2 minutes after each hour.

We’ve recently upgraded GuildQuality’s member directory and member profiles to include an activity stream with each member’s newly published information. We’re calling this the GuildQuality Stream. This enhancement serves two primary purposes:

First, the stream enables visitors to see more information about our members, and help them get a better understand of what you are all about. When your customer report gets updated with more survey feedback, when you add a listing, when you flag a customer comment to be published, when you publish another blog post, when you post something new on twitter — all this content streams into the GuildQuality feed on our home page, as well as your own company specific feed on your profile page.

Second, we’ve added RSS to each of the streams, as well as your customer report. This enables you to grab all of your company’s activity or newly published customer comments and stream them wherever you want. You can auto-tweet your published customer comments, feed your activity into your company intranet, or simply subscribe to it via Google reader or any other RSS reader. The idea is that we’re making it easy for you to stay updated, and even easier to share it with the world.

To get a taste of what all this means, check out GuildQuality’s updated home page and our own member profile.

For a run down of all the specifics, as well as instructions on how to take advantage of it all, read on: (more…)

David is putting the final touches on an enhancement to your member profile page and the main GuildQuality home page. The picture above is a snapshot from the updated home page.

The home page will have an aggregate feed of all member activity, and each member’s profile page will show their own company’s activity. If you publish your Customer Report, your personal activity feed will display when you’ve received survey responses (i.e. when the Customer Report is updated with new feedback). If you use Twitter or have a company blog, the activity feed will also display your company’s posts and tweets (refreshed on the hour).

The objective is to help visitors to your profile page get a better understanding of what your company is like, and also help you to broadcast your activity on a larger scale.

We’ll also be adding RSS to each activity feed and your customer report. The Customer Report RSS feed will capture your newly published customer comments. So using that feed in conjunction with a service like TwitterFeed will make it easy for you to auto-post those customer experiences to your Facebook Fan Page or company Twitter account.

Susan Bady, Senior Editor of Custom Builder Magazine, penned an excellent article on Payne & Payne, NAHB’s Custom Builder of 2009. I caught a picture of the award announcement at the Custom Builder Symposium in November, and had the pleasure of spending a good bit of time with most of the Paynes.

Congratulations to Case/Design Remodeling, Professional Remodeler’s 2010 Remodeler of the Year. I’m thrilled to see them earn this type of recognition after the kind of year the industry had in 2009. Case is among a large handful of our members that constantly challenge us to improve the way we do business, and they always initiate those conversations with some thoughtful suggestions that would bring value to both them and our larger membership. A number of the enhancements (both small and large) that we’ve made over the last three years are things that emerged from a conversation with the Case team.

This weekend, we launched the GuildQuality API. The API enables our regular members (association accounts are not yet supported) to re-purpose GuildQuality survey feedback in any format they wish. As an example, you might be interested in displaying your latest GQ stats in your company’s intranet. With the API, you can build a table that displays your up-to-date key metrics or most recent survey responses.

Super Users and Admin Users can access the API via Account Settings in Preferences.

We’ve created the API for a few reasons:

First, we wanted to help you pull your GuildQuality feedback into the other softwares that you use. We firmly believe that the single greatest thing you can do to improve your performance is to communicate your feedback throughout your team. The API will help you get it out of your account and into the hands of the men and women that care for your customers.

Second, we field a TON of requests for customization. Many of those requests are for improvements that would benefit all of our members. When we field those, we add them to our engineering pipeline, and eventually they’ll see the light of day (the API itself is a good example of a member-requested enhancement). But many of those requests are for reports that would be interesting and useful to a small subset of our members. The API gives those members a viable option for taking the ball and running with it themselves.

Lastly, the API opens a number of doors for us. Initially, it will be a one-way-out system. Meaning it will enable you to take data out of the system and re-purpose it as you see fit. Ultimately, we envision expanding the API so that you can also write to your account from other systems — i.e. updates to customer records in Peachtree or Salesforce will update your customer records in GuildQuality. That’s a ways off, but this is a big step in that direction.

The long term goal is, as always, to make it easier for you to use and get value out of your membership in our community of quality.