GuildQuality

This month’s newsletter includes an update about GuildQuality badges, reviews in search results, lots of member and partner news, and job openings at GuildQuality.

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I haven’t been able to figure out how to produce a single page to display all the comments shared by our members on Facebook, but Twitter makes it pretty easy: Check it out via this link. And below is a screen grab from this afternoon. Here’s a blog and video post describing how our integration with Twitter works.

A couple weeks ago, we received the following comment in a review from one of our members about their experience with GuildQuality:

After placing the GQ button in several places on our site and large-type testimonials at the top of most pages, our conversion rate literally doubled overnight, because we were now pushing TRUST on the site instead of “look at me, I’m wonderful!”

Nice! Here’s more about our GuildQuality Badges.

Since launching GuildQuality Reviews a few months ago, homeowners have provided us with nearly 3,000 reviews — a star rating and comment of at least 30 words — about their experience with one of our builder or remodeler members. Below is the distribution of reviews by star rating. Interestingly, practically no one gives a 2-star rating.

We have a couple more components to add and a lot more work to do before we release the updated dash into the wild, but this screenshot should give you a general idea of what’s to come. And here’s a screen shot of the new dash, expanded.

Check out Professional Remodeler’s 2011 40 under 40. You’ll see Jeremy Jackson & Brandon LeRoy of Jackson & LeRoy, plus more than two dozen additional Guildmembers. You’ll also find some wonderful personal profiles for each entrepreneur.

Learn from the mistakes of others. You can’t live long enough to make them all yourself. – Eleanor Roosevelt

Everybody makes mistakes, right? Well, we made a big one last week. If you received an email from me about it on Tuesday, then your company was unlucky enough to be touched by it, and we’re deeply sorry. We printed incorrect customer names on the inside of several hundred of our survey mailers sent on behalf of dozens of our members. We designed our survey process to reinforce your business’ quality image, and this mixup did the exact opposite of that.

If you didn’t receive an email from me, then you’re part of the overwhelming majority of our membership that doesn’t need to worry about it. Even so, I thought I’d share a little about it here, as mistakes are learning opportunities (we learned a lot) and the more people that can learn from them, the more we can temper the pain of the mistake.

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Daily5Remodel is running a contest. Remodelers can submit projects on homes older than 50 years; readers vote on their favorite and the remodeler of the most popular project receives an iPad. At least half the remodelers who submitted projects are GuildQuality members, so it may be inappropriate for me to play favorites, but I’m going to anyway.

Here are my two reasons why you should vote for Classic Remodeling’s King Street Renovation in Charleston:

1) I know Classic Remodeling’s founder, Bob Fleming. He and I go way back. We served on the Charleston HBA’s board together, and his company was among the very first companies to join GuildQuality. I’m pretty sure that Classic Remodeling was the very first to ever actually pay us anything. So when I say “I know Bob,” I mean I really know him. Not only does he make a mean Mojito (really mean), but Bob is a true technologist. He does whatever he can to pull technology into his business. He was using his laptop to show off pictures of work before most people had email addresses. If anyone can take that iPad prize and use it to help people envision their home’s potential, it’s Bob Fleming.

2) By coincidence, I lived next door to this house when I was in my early twenties (to the immediate right of the picture). The home I lived in had a history of it’s own — built in 1721, it was (and is) the oldest wooden structure that’s still standing in Charleston. It looks it, too! My apartment opened right onto the sidewalk, which is precisely where the carriage tours stopped 50 times a day to give the tourists an opportunity to marvel at the home next door (Bob’s work, pictured above). While they marveled, the tour guides shared a story: My next-door neighbor’s home was a labor of love by one of Charleston’s most talented builders. While talented, he was notoriously awkward and shy, and he’d fallen in love with a beautiful woman from New Orleans. After much coaxing, the woman reluctantly agreed to marry him on the condition that he built her the home of her dreams. He set right to work, and several years later, when he wrote to inform her of it’s completion and ask for her hand, her family wrote back to tell him that he’d missed his chance. She’d married a man named P.T. Barnum several months earlier. The builder never found another love, and upon his death, he left the house to the church. The only way to salvage the tragedy of this house is to help Bob win an iPad.

So by voting for Classic Remodeling you’ll be simultaneously helping people envision the home of their dreams, while bringing a happy ending to a tragic story of lost love.