GuildQuality

I spotted this Guildmember’s sign in Ansley Park this morning.

Delivering a beautifully built new home, perfecting a kitchen renovation, or rebuilding the entire exterior of a home is no easy task. So it’s always amazing to me when our wonderful builders, remodelers, contractors, and developers actually deliver the kind of service and craftsmanship that leaves customers thrilled with their work. That they do it with such overwhelming frequency borders on the miraculous.

So here’s my challenge to you all: Don’t squander all that hard work and lose that relationship over something as trivial as a little oversight or a lack of communication. Instead, capitalize on that amazing accomplishment, and enjoy the benefits of a great relationship with each of your customers in perpetuity.

The significant majority of our members survey their customers multiple times, with the last survey occurring at or near the expiration of the warranty period. But what are you missing if you end your surveying with the expiration of the warranty? In the years that follow, your customers will…

1) forget about you;

2) have intended to send your information to their friend after that cocktail party, but forgotten about it, and hadn’t received anything from you that might serve as a reminder;

3) have a problem that you could easily fix, but are just going to suffer it because it’s too much effort to let you know about it and it’s such a little thing. Then little Sally has a birthday party and the parent of one of the guests (who is a homebuilder) points it out, and that conversation turns into a bigger conversation about building that second home at the lake, and your customer builds a second home (or a new kitchen, or a deck, or a carport — you get the idea) but they never spoke with you about it.

And all because you didn’t make it easy for them to stay in touch with you. How can we fix this? Simple:

Let’s modify your default survey scenario to add a few more extremely brief Long After Closing surveys. We’ll ask your clients if they’d still recommend you and if there’s anything you can help them with.

If you’d like some help setting this up, please let us know.

A couple weeks ago, we released the GuildQuality Twitter Client. I have to admit, I’ve probably been paying way too much attention to it, but a ton of our twittering members absolutely love it, so it seems our investment has been worthwhile.

This weekend, we pushed out a little tweak to the auto-tweet feature (or tweet-tweak, if you will) that added the city and state of the commenter into the auto-tweeted comment. After overcoming a tiny glitch, it now seems to be working perfectly again.

We wanted to include the city and state in the tweeted comment, so that the message would appear in local search results. If, as in the example above, someone is searching for what’s going on right now in Navarre, FL, and a comment from one of our members’ customers in Navarre has recently been posted, then folks will see it. That makes it easier for people to keep a finger on what’s happening in their area. Now, your customers’ voices can be a part of that dialog.

If you’re not familiar with Google’s “Updates” search, you can learn more here.

One of the most common enhancement requests we receive is for an easy way to print a high-quality version of the GuildQuality Customer Report. Printing a web page is tricky business, and every browser will do it differently, so coming up with a built-in solution to consistently render HTML on the printed page is a deceptively big project, so we’ve instead been focusing our engineering resources on other things.

However, I completely appreciate that a high-quality printed version of the Customer Report is a great addition to your marketing collateral. With that in mind, I wanted to share how I go about producing high-quality images of webpages. Hopefully you’ll find this useful for your Customer Report and other pages as well. Check out this video for a brief explanation, and if you like this method, download the “Screengrab” plugin for Firefox.

One additional thing I neglected to show in the video: If your customer report is very long, you might want to just print the first page. However, if you’d like to have the footer show up on a printed version, you should shorten your report — either by shortening the period of time displayed in the Customer Report, or by removing some customer comments.