GuildQuality

Late this evening, we’ll update our member profile pages with a new design. A significant part of this redesign involves the introduction of GuildQuality Reviews. Once our redesign goes live, your customers will be able to provide a public review of your company along with their survey response.

We’ve been piloting GuildQuality reviews with our own member surveying since late November, and in the last couple weeks we expanded our pilot program to include about 50 Guildmembers. From the surveying we’ve done with our Guildmembers during this pilot period, we’ve found that, when asked, roughly a third of survey respondents provide a review along with their survey response.

Why are we introducing GuildQuality Reviews? There are a number of reasons we’re introducing reviews. The main reason is that, for the members who want to leverage their customer feedback to strengthen their brand, our survey process presents a great opportunity to let customers share more (and more useful information) than they’re presently able to. Their published comments are already finding their way into consumer rating services like Google Places, and with the addition of GuildQuality Reviews, more robust, useful, informative commentary will make its way throughout the web.

I fully expect that some of our members will be uncomfortable with the concept of empowering and encouraging their customers to provide reviews. Those members should opt-out of reviews, and we’ve made it easy for them to do so. And there are others who will surely want to opt-out for reasons we haven’t even considered yet. But I expect that most of our members — and especially those who share my opinion that transparency will lead to greater accountability and higher quality – will benefit greatly from GuildQuality Reviews.

Here’s a snapshot of what these reviews look like on the redesigned profile page:

And here’s how the review question appears in your surveys. Note that we only publish reviews if they’re at least 25 words long:

You can also link to and share specific reviews, like this one we received this morning. To see how a full profile page that includes reviews looks, visit our profile page anytime after today.

Following are some important things to note about GuildQuality Reviews and the new member profile pages:

1) If you’re opted in to GuildQuality Reviews, we ask the review question on every survey, and we publish every review we receive, provided it is at least 25 words.

2) GuildQuality Reviews are ONLY available to members who use the 0 to 4 Likely to Recommend question as opposed to the original Yes or No Recommend question. The answer to the Likely to Recommend question forms the star rating that appears alongside each review.

3) If you want to stop publishing your reviews, you can opt out of asking the question at any time by unchecking a box in the marketing section of your account. This will remove the review question from future surveys, and all reviews that you’ve previously received will no long be displayed on your profile page.

4) You can still publish comments that you receive in your survey responses. In your new profile page, published comments appear alongside the reviews.

5) One page to rule them all. Now your company profile, customer feedback, and photographs are all represented on a single page.

6) We eliminated all but two timeframes that members could display. Now you can choose to display either all feedback or your most recent 12 months of feedback. We did this because 98% of members used one of those two timeframes, and supporting the additional timeframes (last 30 days, last 90 days, most recent 20 responses, etc, etc) introduced a considerable amount of complexity that we didn’t feel was worth the benefit.

One last thing: This redesign is not yet finished. All of our work at GuildQuality is iterative — we improve, release, evaluate, and continue the improvement process (continuous improvement is actually one of our Core Values). We have a number of enhancements in our pipeline, and I felt like we could best execute them if we went ahead and launched the redesign, and then observed how it functions in the real world before we added in everything we wanted to add.

Some of the bigger things on our list that we’ll be adding soon:

1) A format specifically designed for printing. This is among our most frequently received enhancement requests, and we’re working on it at this very moment. My apologies for us taking so long with this. My only excuse is that it’s easy to do, but really hard to do well.

2) The ability for members to comment on reviews. Whether a review is positive or negative, a member may want to comment on it — to provide context for the occasional negative review or (more likely) to thank the reviewer for their kind words.

3) The ability to auto-tweet or auto-post-to-Facebook the reviews you receive. Right now, reviews automatically appear on your profile page, but you’re not yet able to click a “publish” button on your survey response and have them launch into the Twittersphere or land on your company’s Facebook page.

4) Guildmaster interviews are temporarily unavailable in the new profile page. We’ll be adding those into the company bio area shortly.

Finally, to manage whether you’re opted-in or not, visit the marketing section in your account tomorrow morning (March 3), and check on the box next to “Ask for and publish Customer Reviews”: