GuildQuality

In our Newsletter from March, you’ll find our Q1 Member Prediction Report, an article on the benefits of transparency and an overview of our new features.

Subscribe to our newsletter here.

This morning, I saw Kyle Hunt mention audio testimonials. I thought it sounded clever, and reached out for more details.

Turns out, it’s pretty easy to set up and easy to implement. Kyle sets up a phone number for you that you can pass on to your clients. They dial in and record a brief message describing their experience working with you, and that message is automagically available to the visitors to your website. Kyle explains the full details here.

Are any of our members doing anything like this? Please share your thoughts/experiences below.

Another video from our team, this time from Laura Summerlin, our director of member services. People join GuildQuality expecting to receive real-time customer feedback and powerful performance reporting. But what surprises new members the most about GuildQuality? It’s all the additional things they can do with their membership.

Last week, the excellent folks at Friendly Human visited GQHQ and filmed our team sharing their thoughts about GuildQuality. We’ll soon have a great new video that helps Guildmembers understand what we’re all about and who we are. Last night, they forwarded me one of the snippets that’s going into the final product.

Herein, Jerrod shares the major reasons why companies that care about their clients and the quality of service they provide sign up for GuildQuality’s trial.

Atlanta Guildmembers: Please join us for lunch at Ansley Golf Club on April 12 from 11:45 to 1:15.

We’ll be giving a brief presentation about GuildQuality’s latest happenings, along with our plans for the near future. We are especially interested in hearing your feedback about GuildQuality, our services, and how we can better serve you.

Please RSVP (using the form below) by April 7. Also, we’d like to keep the event reasonably intimate, so we encourage you to bring up to three additional people from your company. Thanks for being a part of our community of quality-minded home builders, remodelers, and real estate developers. We hope to see you very soon.

P.S. This event is for our members, but we welcome any building, remodeling, and real estate companies in the Atlanta-area who are considering GuildQuality.

(more…)

Below is a guest post from Carl Seville, owner of Seville Consulting. Carl has over 30 years of experience in renovation and home construction, has won more than 100 industry awards and has held numerous leadership positions in the building and remodeling industries. Over the years, he has developed a deep interest and steadfast dedication to green building and living, and through Seville Consulting offers his expertise to homeowners, contractors, non-profits, government agencies and manufacturers through consulting and certification of new and existing building buildings under Earthcraft House, LEED for Homes, ENERGY STAR, and other green building programs.

(more…)

Thank you to all the builders, remodelers, real estate developers, and contractors that participated in the survey. As in the seven prior surveys, more than 100 of you shared your thoughtful, humorous, motivating, painful, and encouraging feedback about the state of residential real estate and construction in general and your businesses in specific. To view prior reports, click here.

For this quarter’s forecast, I’m pleased to report encouraging news: Relative to any other quarter since we began this survey in late 2008, this quarter a higher percentage of our builders, remodelers, and developers predict their next six months will be improved over their last six months. More than 80% of members predict improvement in their businesses’ performance and more than 60% predict improvement in the market in general.

(more…)

Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about the broad topic of incentives and how best to align them. Perhaps because it’s been hovering around in the back of my mind, these two paragraphs from Martin Freedland’s post about hiring really stood out to me:

The candidate enters the interview knowing there will be one of two outcomes: A job offer or rejection. And in almost every instance, he will go to great lengths to get the job offer and, therefore, avoid rejection.

The hiring manager is also in a conflicting position. She needs to find someone for the vacant job sooner rather than later. Until the position is filled, there will be a sales territory which is not covered or a project without a supervisor or a controller trying to “fill in” for the empty CFO position. There is pressure on the interviewer to fill the job ASAP with a qualified person. Therein lies the conflict. “I need to get it done fast, but I also need to make sure I get a great person.” The situation is ripe for compromising an important hiring decision.

Read the entire piece for some excellent advice on how to lessen the potentially negative impact of those competing incentives.

Prior to launching GuildQuality Reviews, we piloted the feature with a number of our early adopter members. Far and away, their most popular request was for us to allow them to add their own responses to reviews they receive. And now you can! Watch this two minute video to see how it works.Adding a response to your customer reviews

Adding a response to your customer reviews from GuildQuality on Vimeo.

For all those who’ve been pleading for a print-friendly version of our member profile pages, here’s a progress shot. Making dynamic HTML print-friendly is complicated — especially when every single member’s profile page is different — so this is a deceptively big project.

This afternoon, Miller Brooks posted an important reminder: Who is more important to you? Your current customer or your next one? I recently had two experiences in the same week that reminded me of that very important question.

Example 1: A few weeks ago, one of our team members noticed that a consultant was advertising his company’s services via Adwords using “GuildQuality” as a keyword. Illegal? No. Slimy? Certainly. Potentially confusing to members and prospects who might think we have some sort of relationship with this brand surfer? Absolutely.

So I dialed the owner of the business and immediately plunged into his company’s voicemail:

“Press one for sales; Two for support.”

That prompt perfectly illustrated his company’s priorities and reinforced every preconceived notion I had about the owner. I left a message in his voicemail, asked for a return call, and was unsurprised to never hear back.

Example 2: My oldest child is now in first grade in a private school here in Atlanta. Prior to his admission, and during all our meetings with faculty and staff, we parked right up front next to the main building. I continued this practice after school started whenever I would walk in with him. A few weeks ago, after pulling up to walk him in, someone ran out to greet us. Clearly they were on the lookout.

“I’m sorry — you’re not supposed to park here. This is for faculty, staff, and guests.” The words weren’t impolite, but the tone was.

“Really?” I said, “I’m sorry. I’ve been parking here for months. Is there a sign or something?” She pointed to an obvious sign that I’d never noticed before. I briefly suspected they put it up that morning, just for me. “Okay. Um. Where should I park?” Aside from the dozen empty parking spaces surrounding my Jeep, I could see no other options.

“You can park across the street, but you can’t park here,” she replied.

So as I drove my son across the street to find the mythical parking area toward which she had gestured (and which I never found), I reflected on the tuition check that I (the customer) had just written, the checks that the guests (the prospects) had not yet written, and the checks that the faculty and staff (the employees) were regularly cashing. And I wondered aloud why WE were the ones driving around blindly searching for a place to park.

Both of these incidents annoyed me. But after a little reflection, I realized that I really should have been thanking these people for the reminder: What might I be doing that’s sending the wrong message to my team? What might our company be doing that’s sending the wrong message to our members, partners, peers, or vendors? What’s the message we want to send, and how do we send it?

So don’t forget: You earn your reputation in all sorts of ways — from the way you care for your customers, to the way you market your business, to where you ask someone to park, to how you set up the prompts on your voicemail system. The little things matter.

And thanks to Miller Brooks for the reminder.

I recently received an email from Bill Warnock at Buist Moore Smythe McGree. Buist Moore is the real estate law firm that I’ve worked with on some South Carolina real estate ventures:

I want to let you know about a recent opinion from the South Carolina Supreme Court handed down last Friday that drastically reduces a contractor’s protection under a commercial general liability insurance policy when doing business in South Carolina.  The opinion virtually eliminates insurance coverage under CGL policies for construction defect claims.

You can read all the details on the Buist Moore website.

Now (in South Carolina at least) it seems the interests of the contractor are less directly aligned with one of their most important vendors: their general liability insurer.

While this doesn’t explicitly relate to customer satisfaction, I think it’s a relevant issue. The environment in which businesses operate is a significant contributor to the long-term health of their relationships with clients and vendors. Are their interests aligned? Are their interests in opposition? Do their agreements among each other (and the laws that govern them) increase their incentive to support one another or erode it?

Relationships are complicated things, and I don’t quite know how this will impact the way contractors, clients, and insurers work together. On one hand, it seems like it may foster an antagonistic relationship between insurer and client, where before they were on the same side of the fence. On the other hand, perhaps it will lessen the potential upside for plaintiffs seeking damages, thereby shrinking the size of the target on contractors’ back, and increasing the incentive for customers and contractors to work things out amicably (i.e. correct a defect) rather than go to the mattresses. Time will tell.

Regardless, the ripples (and waves) that will inevitably come from changes in the law remind me of the this quote from Edmund Burke:

Manners are of more importance than laws. Manners are what vex or soothe, corrupt or purify, exalt or debase, barbarize or refine us, by a constant, steady, uniform, insensible operation, like that of the air we breathe in.

The February issue of Remodeling Magazine included a personal story from Alberta Leone of Franzoso Contracting in Croton on Hudson, NY.

The story is a firsthand account of how the Franzoso team took what could have been a painful disconnect between a customer’s expectations and the reality of what was built, and cemented a lifelong client relationship by turning it into an opportunity to demonstrate their commitment to delivering a great customer experience.

This story is the first in a series in both Remodeling and Replacement Contractor magazines called “At Your Service”. The series will feature GuildQuality members describing everyday service challenges they’ve faced, and what they did about to overcome them.

A handful of our members have submitted story ideas for this series, and the editors at Remodeling and Replacement are reviewing their submissions, following up, and making edits for future editions of “At Your Service.”

I encourage you to contribute your own story. Here are some guidelines:

1) Limit your article to about 500 words.

2) Make it useful, rather than promotional. While a story about how your business addresses a service challenge is inherently promotional, it’s only going to get chosen by editors if you make it useful to the audience of Remodeling and Replacement Contractor.

3) Be specific and tell a story. In the words of Sal Alfano, Editorial Director of Hanley Wood’s Remodeling Group, “What is going to make this series a success are your personal stories. This is an opportunity to provide practical examples of customer service at work–the kind of real-world interactions that other remodelers can emulate. The more concrete the examples, the better.”

4) Include your company’s name in the filename of your document, along with the name of this series: i.e. “Smith Construction, At Your Service”.

5) Include your contact information, a description of the project, and the project location in the body of the document.

6) Send your story to Sal Alfano at salfano at hanleywood dot com.

Thanks for being a member of our community of quality. I hope you can find the time to share your own stories with the larger remodeling community.

Theresa Burney of Builder reports that Quadrant Homes, following some “intensive market research,” has shifted away from their rigid offering that enabled them to deliver “More House Less Money,” to a “Built Your Way” product that’s giving their buyers a tremendous range of choices.

“’With More House Less Money,’ we made all the choices,” said Krivanec. “They can do that now with ‘Built Your Way.’ … In the process if they say, for example, ‘We want to move this wall, move these windows, change the floor break.’… We will let them do that. That’s a level of customization we haven’t done before.”

With their lean manufacturing system, they’re still able to deliver a finished home in an astonishingly short time:

While one might think that increasing the level of potential customization to homes would cause havoc to the production calendar of a company such as Quadrant, which practices evenflow construction methods, finishing a home in 54 working days, Krivanec said it hasn’t.

“What’s really been great about this is that all the great work we’ve done creating the lean manufacturing system is paying off,” said Krivanec. “We realized that we can actually let people make changes to their homes in a customized way” without affecting the evenflow process.