The latest news from GuildQuality.

Stacey Freed, Senior Editor of Remodeling Magazine, has put together a three-part series on how remodelers can “engineer the customer experience”. This series asks remodelers to ponder the question “What do clients really need and how can I make my world work best for them?”. She guides remodelers through the customer experience in three stages; sales, production and post-project warranty work (June 2008).

Her latest installment “Productive Production” (part two) focuses in on production; “what makes and keeps clients happy as their homes and lives are turned upside down during a remodel”. Stacey Freed talks with GuildQuality President and Founder Geoffrey Graham about, among other things, the correlation between the overall customer experience and high rankings in scheduling, punch list and communication.

“The most important thing for homeowners is schedule,” says Graham, “followed by punch list and communication.” “There might be delays,” he says, “but if a remodeler communicates [about those delays] in a way that a customer appreciates and understands, overwhelmingly the customer is happy”. And those happy customers will recommend their remodeler. … “If a remodeling company regularly struggles in those areas, they aren’t as profitable as those people who have those things down pat.”

This is an excellent series and we recommend it to any quality-minded remodeler looking for ways to fortify or improve on their delivery of an exceptional customer experience.

Yes, its that time of year again. We are thrilled to announce the official 2008 Guildmaster Award Winners.

Guildmasters differ in their types of work, but all have a lengthy track record of superior customer service. These Awards were based upon a review of over 40,000 customer satisfaction survey responses for nearly 600 building and real estate professionals nationwide.

To be eligible for an award, a GuildQuality member, a Guildmember if you will, must have achieved a recommendation rate of 90% or greater and at least 70% of their customers must have completed a customer satisfaction survey. For those eligible, additional criteria deemed indicative of outstanding customer service was used to generate the final list of Award winners. This year, this process produced 102 Guildmasters!

GuildQuality Founder and President Geoff Graham says,

GuildQuality’s mission is to elevate the building and real estate profession to a stature commensurate with its importance in our lives. A tremendous part of that involves equipping home builders, remodelers, and developers with easy-to-use tools to monitor and improve the quality of their service. But we also take every opportunity we can to celebrate excellence when we see it. These 102 Guildmembers have demonstrated their commitment to exceptional service, and we’re honored to be able to recognize them.

Rachel Foster of Atlanta based Construction Ahead, Inc., one of only six companies to have ever been awarded the Guildmaster with Highest Distinction Award in back to back years says,

… being honored with Guildmaster Awards enable us to instill the additional confidence and affirmation potential and referred clients need when making their decision to engage us as their contractor… The critique we receive from GuildQuality truly gives our company the tools we need to monitor and uphold our mission statement, “Construction Ahead retains satisfied
clients for life.”

Congratulations 2008 Guildmasters. You’ve all made it through some very tough criteria. Recognition of your achievements are very well deserved.

Click here to view the complete list of this year’s recipients.

Click here to read the press release.

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We are very excited to announce that, this week, the Projects & Surveying section of your account received a major upgrade. Some of the highlights are:

- A simplification of the projects and surveying section. Things are easier to reach.

- A global search at the top of each page allowing members to search by customer, address, phone number, etc..

- Tools allowing members to not only communicate with users on projects, but also with our surveying team (see above image).

- What we call “survey transparency”; a way for members to see when each survey attempt is taking place.

- Brief Video Tutorials to guide you through every facet of GuildQuality’s surveying and reporting system (courtesy of Member Service Director, Erin Rosintoski).

Kudos again, to the GuildQuality Engineering Team for their outstanding work.

GuildQuality’s survey response rate presently stands at 72.0%. We use a pretty straightforward calculation of response rate: The number of customers who responded divided by the number of customers attempted.

Our response rate over time. Roughly 50% respond within two weeks of us starting our process; 60% within 30 days; 70% within 60 days; and then we gain a few extra points after that. Those late respondents are generally customers who let their builder or remodeler know that they missed the original survey and would like to receive the survey again.

Delivering feedback in real-time. As soon as we receive a survey response, the appropriate person (or people) in the member’s office receives an email notification with the response details. At that moment, all of the member’s online reporting is updated to reflect the new response. Those that don’t receive notifications, can see the history of recent responses on the dashboard of their account.

Mail, email, and phone. Every customer receives a survey mailer. If our members provide us with email addresses and phone numbers, their customers will also receive surveys that way.

Our telephone surveying office is in lovely Eatonton, GA. By complete coincidence, it is in the same office building as one of our members.

We get lots of comments. In addition to ratings, customers provide about 25 words of commentary per response. Overall 65% of respondents elaborate with comments. That percentage is lower for email and mail responses, and much higher for phone.

I snagged a few recent comments at random to give you a better idea of the sort of things we hear:

“Darrel, the project manager was wonderful. He did everything very promptly and professionally. Jenny was very informative about the neighborhood and the homes.”

“I was particularly taken with their ability to adapt to the inevitable ‘gotchas’ that show up in almost any job. They were very flexible and extremely accommodating to our needs.”

“They just have too many people working for them messing things up.”

“I love the big kitchen and pantry. I also love my balcony porch on the second floor.”

“We still have an outstanding sprinkler issue. They were supposed to come look at it sometime soon.”

I’ve written a little more about our surveying process and customer satisfaction surveying in general here, here, and here.

I’m regularly asked, “What do your builders, remodelers, and developers do to ensure that they have happy customers?” Far and away, the most effective thing that they do is share their customer feedback with everyone in the company.

Innumerable strategies will ratchet up your scores, but nothing will have as much impact as simply sharing your customer feedback. I am overwhelmingly pleased to see so many of our members begin their GuildQuality membership with a 75% recommendation rate, and within a year it has jumped dramatically.

What have they done? They’ve given access to GuildQuality’s reporting system to everyone in their company. That means everyone sees feedback in real-time. Everyone sees trends in the company’s (and their own) performance. Everyone begins to appreciate that a big part of their job is to be a faithful steward of the company’s reputation, and to do so by serving the customer.

Without any special programs, initiatives, or bonus structures, simply sharing customer feedback can carry a company from thoroughly mediocre to vastly improved.

Here’s a snapshot from a member that joined in Q4 2006:

We’re in the business of helping building and real estate professionals deliver an exceptional customer experience. We work with businesses of all sizes and types: nationally recognized volume homebuilders, high-end custom builders, professional remodelers, multifamily developers, and replacement contractors.
So how do we serve the needs of such a diverse group of building and real estate companies? We have a laser focus on keeping it simple and making an impact.

Simple. It’s simple for the company to adopt our service and start surveying. Simple for the customer to respond to our surveys. Simple for the company to interpret the feedback.

Impactful. Our survey feedback is comment-rich, delivered in real-time, and distributed to the right people. Employees receive a response the moment the customer provides it, can immediately understand how that customer feels, and take action if something needs attention. Executives can easily identify trends in their teams’ performance: Who’s the best? How does this quarter compare against the prior quarters? Where do we fall short, and where do we excel?

Our Simple & Impactful strategy seems to be working. Among the companies that we served as of January 1, 2007, we were still serving more than 93% of them as of January 1, 2008. And we keep their business with no strings attached: Our members can cancel their service at any time for any reason, and they can export all of their feedback before they go. So to keep them happy, we have to earn their business every month.

* Prepended update:  On January 31st, GuildQuality presented the first in a series of Webinars “Making Customer Satisfaction a Priority in your Business”. It was a remodeler focused discussion on how two nationally-recognized companies (Strite design + remodel and Normandy Builders) internalize and promulgate customer satisfaction through every facet of the business– from the first time a customer interacts with a company representative to the last punchlist item. They stressed the importance of properly setting customer expectations (remodeling can be unpleasant!), holding team members accountable to their customers’ experiences, and follow up with customers for referral business. Strite and Normandy also discussed adjustments each had to make in their marketing strategies (in response to market downturns). They elaborated on changes in both traditional marketing strategies and implicit marketing– via team member interactions. Again, our speakers provided wonderful insight into how customer satisfaction impacts the way they conduct business both in the office and in the field.

For those able to attend, we thank you and hope that you enjoyed it. For those unable to attend, “Making Customer Satisfaction a Priority in your Business” is now available for viewing in its entirety here. Thanks again, to Jim Strite, Jack Steindl, and Karen Cericola for taking time out of their busy schedules to participate. - Regards - Your GuildQuality Team.

******************

On January 31st, GuildQuality will be hosting a live online webinar for remodelers. It will be a discussion featuring the principals of Normandy Builders and Strite Design + Remodel moderated by our founder, Geoff Graham.

Chicago-based Normandy Builders earned Professional Remodeler’s 2007 “Remodeler of the Year” award for their accomplishments in customer service, sales and marketing, and leadership. Normandy Builders has been using GuildQuality for its customer satisfaction surveying since 2006.

Boise-based Strite design + remodel has been designated by Qualified Remodeler magazine as one of the nation’s Top 500 remodelers every year since its inception. They’ve been featured on the cover of Remodeling Magazine, and are the recipient of numerous awards for their exceptional business practices, working environment, and contributions to the remodeling profession. Strite design + remodel has been using GuildQuality for its customer satisfaction surveying since 2004.

This is an exciting opportunity to hear from two of the industry’s most respected companies and the role that customer satisfaction plays in the growth of their businesses. Join us!

Date: January 31st, 2008
Time: 2pm EST
Duration: (under an hour)

I have received some great feedback from our members in response to my recent Letter from the Founder. In it, I solicited your constructive commentary about our surveying and reporting systems, and we’ve received some great insights and ideas as a result. Thanks! I thought you might find it interesting to know how we prioritize enhancements to our customer satisfaction surveying and reporting system.

Here’s a screen shot of our current “Enhancements” brainstorm (we use a web-based collaboration tool called “Basecamp” to keep track of all of the various projects we’re working on).

(more…)

In the last six months, we’ve started hosting some member meetings in various cities around the country: Charleston, Atlanta, Portland, Charlotte, and Dallas so far. These meetings are great opportunities for me to share with our members the story of our growth over the last four years, talk about some of our plans for the near future, thank people for their business, and hear first-hand what you need from GuildQuality.

In the course of these meetings, it’s becoming clear that it will take us a long time to get to every city, so I thought it prudent to send a letter out to everyone. If you have any constructive commentary for GuildQuality, I am eager to hear it.

Membership Growth. Four years ago, fewer than 25 building professionals relied on us for customer satisfaction surveying. Since then, over 500 homebuilders, remodelers, and real estate developers have joined our community of quality. Our membership now includes nationally recognized homebuilders, small-volume custom builders, multi-family developers, and professional remodelers from over 40 states! Despite their differences, they all share a passion for quality. Could there be a greater group to serve? (more…)

The GuildQuality team has spoken, and our newly crowned Garcia Award Winner is Geoff Hartnett, our Director of Web Marketing.

Every member of the GQ team nominates up to three people for the award, and the team member with the most nominations wears the Garcia Mantle until a new winner is chosen. Previous award winners include Laura Summerlin (Survey Manager), Michael Hardy (Data Support Administrator), and Erin Rosintoski (Membership Director).

Hartnett’s takes care of most of our design work, the public website, and virtually all of our marketing. Some of the recent contributions that earned him the team’s accolades: his significant work in enhancing our web presence, his expert production of our communications, and his big help in making the Remodeling Show a great event for us. Hartnett is a big part of the reason why so many people are familiar with our customer satisfaction surveying for quality-minded building professionals.

Congratulations to Geoff Hartnett. Thanks for all your tremendous contributions to GuildQuality.

Geoff Hartnett and I dropped by Pilot Builders (Eatonton, GA) earlier this week. We were in the area visiting with some prospects and poked our heads in unannounced.

The first thing Brenda pointed us to was their framed Guildmaster award on the wall. In 2007, we started giving out awards certificates for our Guildmasters in addition to the website recognition. This is the first one I’ve seen hung on a member’s wall. Nice!

We calculate our Guildmaster Awards using all customer feedback for the year (or potentially longer, for smaller volume members). Members that have had all of their customers surveyed are eligible, and two stats factor into the award: Response Rate and Recommendation Rate.

Last week, GQ packed up an “econo” van and 10 of us (including 2 non-swimmers; one of which tried to unsuccessfully back out) made the well anticipated two hour trek to the Georgia / Tennessee border to battle the Ocoee River.

I did a little research on the Ocoee river since the trip and found the history to be quite interesting. The riverbed was dry from 1912-1978 as the water was diverted to an elevated wooden plume and directed down into a water power plant. The plants were condemned in 1976 and the river flowed freely again two years later in 1978. In 1984, whitewater enthusiasts formed a council and, backed by Congress, made it available to the public. Since then, the Ocoee (class III - VI rapids) has hosted international slalom events, kayak rodeo championships, and, in 1996, the Olympic Slalom.

When we arrived, the river guides corralled and prepped our groups (GQ was split into two groups of 5; one non-swimmer in each raft). In doing so, they warned the non-swimmers that it was their last chance to back out. We had them each surrounded and at arm’s length; a strategic formation. Their faces sank.

We entered the cold river water with our guides screaming to us that this first rapid was a class IV and would be the most dangerous. Since then, I’ve researched the river grading system which categorizes class IV rapids as “Difficult rapids with high, powerful, irregular waves; broken and confused water; often boiling eddies; strong stoppers; ledges; drops and dangerous exposed rocks.” Both rafts got through the rapid just fine, however, lost sight of one another. 3 or 4 rapids later, our rafts were reunited. I gave non-swimmer #1, the inquiring thumbs up. Her mouth formed words very slowly and deliberately … “I … FELL … OUT” … and let out a laugh.

Our raft felt confident and strong. We were, after all, intact and without incident. Non-swimmer #2 even got out during a swimming rapid to float with us. Shortly thereafter, as luck would have it, we approached a rapid named Double Trouble (containing two “ledges”). Somewhere between the first and second ledge, our guide began to scold us as we found ourselves sideways going into the second ledge. We were toast. Quite literally, 3 of us (including non-swimmer #2) popped out into the river like toast out of a toaster. We were able to get non-swimmer #2 back into the raft in no time flat. She thanked me for “saving her life”, and I let her believe I did.

We all had a wondeful time and for “non-swimmers #1 and #2″, it was a primal experience.

I just noticed that Tuesday brought us an all-time record number of visits to our reporting system. 600 visitors spent a total of over 30 collective hours reviewing their customer feedback, benchmarking their performance against that of their peers, looking for ways to improve their customers’ experiences, or (if they were customers) responding to a survey.

To commemorate that record, I thought I’d share with you where that traffic originated (courtesy of Google Analytics).

This is a map of YTD traffic from cities that have sent us 10 or more visitors. Since January 1, 2007, we’ve serviced over 36,000 visitors from 400 different locations.

As you can probably infer from the map, as of June 19, we had ZERO members in either Hawaii or Alaska–two places I have never been and would sure like to visit.

GuildQuality collects a LOT of customer feedback. Lately, we’ve been interviewing around a hundred homeowners a day about their experience with one of our builders, remodelers, or real estate developers. We deliver that survey feedback, in real-time, to our members in a consistent, actionable, and succinct format. As a big added bonus, we also give them easy-to-use analytical tools to help them track things like the performance of their employees or their company’s performance in contrast with a highly-relevant group of peers.

Our mission is to elevate the building industry to a stature commensurate with its importance in our communities. There’s not many jobs that are more important than that of a homebuilder, remodeler, or developer. These are the folks that are shaping our built environment. They significantly influence both the way we live our lives today, and how we’ll live them for many decades (or even centuries) to come.

Given the importance of the building profession, I was pleased to see a significant trend emerge from a research project we’ve been working on. With the help of 15 remodelers and Remodelers Advantage, we’ve been able to make some judgments about the correlation between customer satisfaction and profitability.

We were trying to assess whether or not customer satisfaction impacted gross margin. Here’s what we found:

(more…)

Carol Smith is a recognized expert in customer satisfaction for the homebuilding industry, and we’re proud to share many customers with her company, Home Address. Carol and her team offer consulting services and products such as on-site assessments, telephone consultation, and in-house training for any size builder.

GuildQuality is thrilled to have Carol’s endorsement (below) - she and her team certainly share our passion for service excellence:

“GuildQuality brings a fresh approach to the customer survey process. Their common sense insights make gathering feedback from your customers easy and economical while providing you with information you can apply to reach your customer satisfaction goals. I am pleased to recommend them to builders of all sizes.”

We hope that you’ll take a close look at Home Address’s offerings - several GuildQuality members have enlisted their services and have seen terrific results.