Quality-minded home builders, remodelers, developers and contractors rely on our customer satisfaction surveying to help them provide exceptional service

In this webinar, GuildQuality shares specific strategies to differentiate your business online using “quality” as the theme.   Stand out from the crowd.

Last week, a remodeler posted a question  to NARI’s LinkedIn Discussion Group, asking her peers for advice about customer satisfaction surveying, and many of our wonderful members chimed in with their opinions. On Friday, I shared that thread in GuildQuality’s own discussion group and that seems to have attracted a few more Guildmember comments.

If you’re a member of NARI, I encourage you to check out the discussion — there’s thoughtful advice from many accomplished remodelers, at least ten of whom are GuildQuality members.

While the question was posted in a remodeling forum, I think it’s relevant to any business who surveys their customers, especially companies in the residential construction and real estate space. Here are my own thoughts in reply to her question — some of which were reiterated by the company owners who chimed in on the discussion:

1) Third-party surveying results in honest feedback. The old joke in customer satisfaction surveying is “If you want people to tell you what you want to hear, ask them yourself. If you want to hear the truth, have someone else ask them.” I am always surprised to learn that some builders and remodelers still hand out a survey at the closing table or the end of the job, watch the client complete it, and then brag about their 99% response rate and 99% recommendation rate. Hint: They are lying to you.

2) Response rate is important. As Fred Reichheld notes, lengthy and low-response-rate market research surveying is an altogether different animal than customer satisfaction surveying. Your surveying process is an extension of your service, so do it in a way that engages your clients rather than alienates them. In addition to keeping surveys succinct and relevant, we also give people lots of options to reply (email, phone, and mail). And so we never lose site of the fundamental requirement that our surveying process support the overall service experience, we give respondents an opportunity to share with us their feedback about completing our surveys. Here’s how we do it and what they have to say.

3) Take immediate action. If you sporadically survey your customers, and if only 35% of them reply, you can’t really rely on surveying to give you an accurate picture of performance, and it definitely won’t help you identify issues that need immediate attention. But if 75% of customers reply, and you survey everyone right after contract, close, near the expiration of their warranty, and on the anniversary of their closing every year thereafter, you’ve got a real system in place to monitor quality. And — even more valuable than the reliable trend reporting — you can count on your surveying to churn up real issues that need attention right then. Thankfully, that attention is just as likely to take the form of a thank you for a kind comment or constructive suggestion as it is to be a follow up to attend to something that’s not done to your standard of quality. And if you regularly survey long after the job is done, that check-in is likely to result in a referral or even more work with the same client. A key, however, is that you MUST take action. That means distributing your feedback to your entire team so that the right people can follow up.

4) Benchmark your performance. Lacking anything but reports about average referral rates among builders and remodelers, you might feel pretty good about an 86% recommendation rate. Not so fast. You want to be comparing yourself against the best in the business — not the average. In this market, only the best companies survive and thrive. You can read evidence of that here and here.

5) Don’t just file the feedback away in a drawer. There are all sorts of things you can do with these wonderful comments, and tracking performance from quarter to quarter or superintendent to superintendent is just the beginning. Nothing influences your prospective clients like the opinions and experiences of your past clients. So get that feedback out there where people can find it — whether that’s in a GuildQuality Customer Report, on Twitter, on Facebook, or wherever.

Every member of our small crew pulls a lot of weight. From time to time, I forget the importance of lifting my head up from my own oar, and making sure that everyone’s clear on exactly where we’re rowing. A couple weeks ago, my brother gave me a helpful reminder in the form of a Jim Collins quote:

The number one responsibility of a leader is to catalyze a clear and shared vision for the company and to secure commitment to and vigorous pursuit of that vision.

I spent some time reflecting on that reminder, and shortly thereafter penned a lengthy letter to all of our people here at GuildQuality. After mulling it over for a few days, I thought it appropriate to share those thoughts with all of our Guildmembers and anyone else that has an interest in where GuildQuality is going.

I’ll call out one paragraph from near the end of the letter — mainly because it relates to what GuildQuality is doing right this minute with pictures of our members’ work:

With published feedback from their customers and photographs of their work — thousands of photographs — our members are sharing a powerful statement with those who depend on them for the care and creation of their houses. They are asking people to judge them not by what they say they’ll do, but to judge them by what they’ve done. Judge them by the feedback from hundreds of their customers. Judge them by the examples of their work. And judge them by the company they keep — the best builders, remodelers, contractors, and real estate developers in North America — all of whom are unique, and all of whom share a commitment to quality.

That paragraph, while specifically relevant to our latest site enhancement, shares the theme I intended to convey throughout the letter: That our mission is, was, and will continue to be to elevate the stature of our industry to a level commensurate with its importance.

For those that are interested, here’s the full version of the letter: (more…)

A few weeks ago, the good folks over at Startup Atlanta invited me and a handful of other real estate/construction/technology entrepreneurs to give a presentations about our companies, and answer questions from the crowd. Daniel at Friendly Human snagged me for this “exit interview”. Somehow, he managed to elicit a coherent statement about who GuildQuality is, what we do, and why we do it. What a pro!

This month, we officially launched our partnership with James Hardie to provide customer satisfaction surveying and performance reporting for their Preferred Remodeler Program.  This relationship is an extension of GuildQuality’s strategy of partnering with the leading manufacturers in the industry (other partners include Pella and Wellborn, with more to come this year).

As a benefit of the Preferred Remodeler program, all JH-installed jobs will be surveyed (unless the remodeler opts out).  When surveys are complete, an email will be sent to the business owner enabling them to see how they performed and follow up as appropriate.  Those remodelers who become full GuildQuality members will be recognized on our website and on the Find a Remodeler section of the JH site. 

In the coming weeks, we will share the results of this partnership.  We are delighted to be working with James Hardie, and look forward to spending time with  members of the Advisory Board and executive team next month in Chicago.

Yesterday, we published our Guildmembers near-term market predictions and strategies. You can view that summary in this blog post.

Today, we finished compiling the feedback we received from non-members. The sample size isn’t as large (while we consistently hear from more than 100 members in this quarterly survey, we generally have only about 50 to 80 non-members participate), but we hear great feedback that’s definitely worth sharing.

As in the Member Predictions Survey, we ask non-members to answer two primary questions:

“Relative to the previous six months, what kind of change do you expect in YOUR COMPANY’S PERFORMANCE over the next six months?”

“Relative to the previous six months, what kind of change do you expect in THE MARKET over the next six months?”

In this quarter, and in previous quarters, non-members and Guildmembers provided a similar forecast for the market as a whole. But when asked about their own business’ prospects for the next six months, non-members are a good bit more cautious (click here to see members’ forecast). With that said, the trend is definitely toward greater optimism among both members and non-members, and, as with our Guildmembers, non-members are more optimistic for their own businesses than for the market in general.

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3/24 Update: You may also be interested in this quarter’s summary of non-member feedback.

Since the fourth quarter of 2008, we’ve regularly surveyed our members, asking their opinions about the near term future for both their company and the the construction and real estate industry. (click here to view all past reports)

In each Member Predictions Survey, we ask our members to answer two primary questions:

“Relative to the previous six months, what kind of change do you expect in YOUR COMPANY’S PERFORMANCE over the next six months?”

“Relative to the previous six months, what kind of change do you expect in THE MARKET over the next six months?”

As in prior quarters, more than 100 of our members participated. This quarter’s feedback (provided between mid-March and yesterday) showed the most optimism since we began our “Guildmember Predictions” surveying. What follows are two ways of viewing their feedback, as well as all of the many comments provided by our homebuilders, remodelers, real estate developers, and contractors.

Guildmember Confidence Index (GCI)

The Guildmember Confidence Index boils all of the answers down to a single number. We calculate the GCI by subtracting the percentage of members predicting decline from the percentage predicting improvement. Therefore, a positive number means more members predict things will be getting better than worse. The only quarter in which the GCI has been negative (so far) has been Q4 2008.

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On Friday, Rackspace informed us that, after becoming an award finalist earlier this year, we did not become the supreme super winner of their coveted FANATI Award. Rackspace has not yet announced the winner, and I hope to have the opportunity to congratulate them when they do.

I understand that Rackspace based their decision on two things:

1) Each candidate’s application video, and

2) The company’s customer satisfaction scores (compiled via Rackspace’s own survey).

Rackspace asked that a random 300 of our members be surveyed. 127 of you graciously responded (even though most of you had already responded to one of GQ’s own member satisfaction surveys).

On Friday, Rackspace shared with us a summary of the survey feedback you provided, and I’m exceedingly pleased to report that we did pretty well. In fact, the Rackspace survey showed us with a Net Promoter Score of a whopping 83.2%. That’s higher than the scores for top performing industry giants like Apple and USAA. It’s also higher than our similarly calculated GuildQuality Index (GQI) of 69% (YTD).

If you are interested in the Net Promoter methodology, you may want to read this brief post from late 2007, or check our Fred Reichheld’s book, The Ultimate Question.

An interview with Kelly Rulis, Vice President of Customer Satisfaction & Experience for John Wieland Homes & Neighborhoods:

Click here to learn more about GuildQuality and our services for homebuilders, remodelers, contractors, and real estate developers.

For a number of years, GuildQuality has allowed our members to opt-in to our public membership directory. We’re interested in sharing with the world which companies rely on GuildQuality to help them deliver an exceptional customer experience. We believe their membership in our community of quality speaks well of them, and it’s certainly a feather in our cap to be the tie that binds so many exceptional businesses together.

But after a while, a simple list starts to get old. So earlier this week, we introduced the GuildQuality Stream — a feed of all of our members’ published activity. For those Guildmembers who have a public profile, we’re publishing their updates. Those updates include their twitter and blog posts, as well as updates to their GuildQuality listings. And if they’ve published their customer feedback, the updates will include survey response notifications and flagged customer comments.

The result is a stream of interesting activity, updated every hour on the hour. You can view what’s going on all over North America, or zoom all the way in, and look at Charleston only.

While I may be biased, I find it mesmerizing. I am unable to keep from returning to check it out at 2 minutes after each hour.

A couple weeks ago, we applied for the Rackspace Fanati Award:

Here at Rackspace, we’ve built a reputation based on service, known to our customers as Fanatical Support; our anytime, anywhere, any way approach to customer service. And we know we’re not the only ones who put customer needs first. That’s why we created The FANATI in 2007 to recognize one of our customers for valuing customer service as much as we do.

I was thrilled to hear that GuildQuality is among a handful of finalists. To determine the winner, Rackspace is presently surveying a random selection of our members (the irony!), as well as a selection of customers from the other finalists.

Rackspace is one of the companies we emulate for our own customer service, and being a finalist for this award is a big coup for our team.

Since the fourth quarter of 2008, we’ve regularly surveyed our members, asking their opinions about the near term future for both their company and the the construction and real estate industry. (click here to view all past reports)

In each Member Predictions Survey, we ask our members to answer two primary questions:

“Relative to the previous six months, what kind of change do you expect in YOUR COMPANY’S PERFORMANCE over the next six months?”

“Relative to the previous six months, what kind of change do you expect in THE MARKET over the next six months?”

As in prior quarters, more than 100 of our members participated. This quarter’s feedback (provided between mid-December and this morning) showed the most optimism since we began our “Guildmember Predictions” surveying. What follows are two ways of viewing their feedback, as well as all of the additional comments provided by our homebuilders, remodelers, real estate developers, and contractors.

Guildmember Confidence Index (GCI)

The Guildmember Confidence Index boils all of the answers down to a single number. We calculate the GCI by subtracting the percentage of members predicting decline from the percentage predicting improvement. Therefore, a positive number means more members predict things will be getting better than worse. The only quarter in which the GCI has been negative (so far) has been Q4 2008.

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On December 3, GuildQuality hosted a webinar to review some of our marketing resources.

This webinar is for builders, remodelers, and developers who’d like to learn how to take advantage of our marketing resources and for those who need a refresher on the subject. We have a number of tools that help our members enhance their online presence and better articulate their quality of service for prospective customers.

In addition to reviewing our complimentary marketing services (like Customer Reports, Member Profiles, Listings, and our integration with a number of social media services), we also discuss prospect surveying.

Each year, Rackspace sponsors a customer service competition. The “Fanati” award is designed to recognized “fanatical” service among the company’s customers. This year’s application required that candidates submit a 5 minute video about their company.

In our video application, you’ll hear three Atlanta-area members describe why they use GuildQuality, what we do for them, and what kind of people make up our team.

Special thanks to Dwayne Hill at Traton Homes, Kelly Rulis at John Wieland Homes & Neighborhoods, Dan Weidmann of Weidmann Remodeling, and Alan Stump (the video’s producer).

In our Newsletter from November, you’ll find an article on best practices, a webinar invitation, member news, and an invite to beta test a new GuildQuality service.