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

In this month’s Remodeling Magazine, Ben Morey of Morey Construction and Martha Stinson of Trace Ventures shared how GuildQuality helps them reward and praise excellent service among their teams.

Morey says that perpetuating the client-feedback loop has been one of his “best tools” for maintaining morale and productivity. He shares survey results in meetings, and especially relishes placing printed copies of client comments on employees’ desks.

Thanks Ben and Martha, for sharing!

Earlier this month, Professional Remodeler published their 5 market leaders from each of the 20 major markets in the United States. Of the 100 companies recognized by ProRemodeler, 21 are GuildQuality Guildmembers.

I’m a firm believer that bigger is not necessarily better. One of my favorite Guildmembers limits his capacity to no more than 7 custom homes per year. Nevertheless, size is a meaningful indicator. In today’s world, it is difficult to grow and sustain a large service business without running a professional operation — and it is especially difficult to do so without also delivering a great customer experience.

I’m grateful that so many of these accomplished businesses allow us to be a part of their strategy for success, and we’re proud of the work we do for them.

This morning, the WSJ published an article entitled On The Internet, Everyone’s A Critic, But They’re Not Very Critical. The essence of the article: “when consumers write online reviews, they tend to leave positive ratings: The average grade for things online is about 4.3 stars out of five.” This article echos a recent YouTube question from their blog: “if the majority of videos are getting five stars, how useful is this system really?”

Visit Yelp, Kudzu, or Google Local and you’ll see this for yourself. Certainly not all experiences are 4.3 stars out of five, so where are all the unhappy folks? The truth is that, despite what you might guess, it is the moderately UNhappy people who are least likely to express an opinion. These are the normal and polite people who, having nothing nice to say, choose to remain silent.

When I started GuildQuality, I assumed the opposite would be true — that unhappy people would be more eager to give feedback. In actuality, when we survey on behalf of the builder, remodeler, or real estate developer, we observe that the best companies have both a high recommendation rate and a high response rate.

An obvious red flag for a business is a low recommendation rate, but another subtler warning sign is a low response rate. That means that your customers no longer care about your company.

This is why internet based ratings are so high — the relatively small percentage of people that provided them are generally passionate about the experience they received. They care so much that they pulled up their browser and published some of their feedback for the benefit of the entire world. If their review is negative, they are likely to be so extremely unhappy that they have become vindictive. This is a tiny minority of customers — even among mediocre businesses. But the majority of internet-based reviews are from people who are ecstatic about their experience — so much so that they will “do the company a favor” by giving some feedback. But most people simply express their opinion with silence: They don’t care enough to make the effort.

This latter group — the silent majority — fills in the void and gives you an accurate picture. These are people like you and me, and the kind of experience they had (but didn’t rate on Google Local) is the kind that all customers are most likely to have.

As the CEO of Yelp said in the WSJ article, “A broader range of opinions can give consumers a more complete view of a business.”

Whether you are a business looking to understand how you are doing, or a consumer deciding whether or not to patronize a business, the most reliable performance report will describe the experience had by all consumers — not just those that provide online ratings. That requires a high rate of participation in a survey of a significant group that is representative of all customers.

At GuildQuality, we try to keep it simple: We encourage every Guildmember to survey every customer, and we have a high response rate to our surveying. That maximizes the value and utility of the member’s survey feedback and performance reporting. And if they choose to publish their performance summaries, then that gives consumers something much more meaningful than a simple 5-star rating.

In the most recent Remodeling Magazine, Victoria Downing penned a tight article on why many remodelers (and custom builders or developers) rely on customer satisfaction surveying to deliver a great customer experience, how they use it in their day to day operations, and how it can help them to drive up referrals.

Longtime member Trace Ventures enjoyed the spotlight in this article. On a related note, Trace Ventures was profiled by HGTVpro in 2008 for their innovative employee compensation strategy that weaves customer satisfaction and gross profit into the bonus plan.

Jim Cory’s article on web marketing describes what a number of forward-thinking remodelers (and their consultants) are doing to get the word out about their businesses. Using technology (and GuildQuality) to articulate your quality to prospective clients is just one of several great suggestions. From the article (Page 3):

What carries far greater weight are views gathered through an independent third-party survey company, such as GuildQuality, which surveys clients and links its feedback results from your site to its company site. Click on any one of 10 subject headings on Eberle Remodeling’s website, for instance, and a link on the left side of the screen says,  “Click here to view our customer satisfaction ratings”, and steers you to the company’s GuildQuality page, which incorporates responses from 72 clients and gives the remodeler a “100% Recommended” rating.

Last month, Professional Remodeler described how Weidmann Remodeling was doing the same thing. Many of our members use their customer report to give people an understanding of what their company is all about from the eyes of past customers. As mentioned last week, I suspect this emerging best practice is one of the contributers to our significant climb in consumer traffic.

Other strategies/initiatives/best practices/resources described in the Remodeling article: search engine optimization, site re-design, google analytics, and client logins.

And don’t stop at the end of the article. There’s a great coda from Remodeling’s Senior Editor Leah Thayer about social networks, in which she answers the question, “What remodeler has the luxury of doing anything as goofy as ‘tweeting’ in an economy like this?”

Back in early July, we posted a preview of the feedback to our most recent Guildmember Confidence survey. The full report is now available for your review. Click here to download it.

In the June issue of Qualified Remodeler, Ken Betz interviews a number of remodelers about how they ensure referral and repeat business.

Guildmember Neil Kristianson of Crimson Design & Construction says,

Really everything we do, from the first meeting to last, is designed to get us referrals. I believe that if done right the clients will go out of their way to help and you don’t need to offer incentives to get referrals. If you have to pay, how heartfelt is it anyway?

He also lists GuildQuality among his core strategies for staying in touch with customers and delivering a great service experience.

In the article, Betz also interviewed me about the benefits of surveying. He sought my counsel on what is the one thing a business ought do with their survey feedback to improve performance. I advised that companies should share feedback with their employees in real-time, so that they can start seeing how their actions influence the customer’s exerience.

When that starts to happen with a business – without even really putting any strategy into place – you end up creating a culture of quality. Employees get in tune with what their customers are thinking, and they begin to think about the job in terms of how it is impacting their customers’ perspective. We tend to see a huge jump in performance when companies start to survey customers.

In his June “Trade Secrets” article in Professional Remodeler, Jonathan Sweet talks with Dan Wiedmann about how his company uses GuildQuality’s customer report to help prospects understand what type of experience they should expect to have if they choose to work with Weidmann Remodeling.

It’s helped us tremendously. I get calls from people who have gone to our Web site first and based on the recommendation have put us on the list of contractors they want to talk to.

Worth noting, in February we updated the look and feel of the Customer Report. Those using the new report have more customization opportunities and are able to monitor traffic to their new report. This has been in place since February. Beginning on July 1, all the old Customer Report links will redirect to the new report page.

Later in the piece, Jonathan highlights another Guildmember, Renewal Design-Build, and their new job security guarantee. He reports that in the event of job loss, job relocation, or inability to secure financing, Renewal will refund 50% of the retainer paid by the client.

This morning, Dennis DuRoff posted my talk from yesterday on how and why GuildQuality uses social media. In it, I describe the various ways the GuildQuality blog, Twitter and LinkedIn help us to service our members and grow our business. I also talk about social media’s direct relevance to customer satisfaction in building and remodeling. how builders and remodelers are using Facebook, and how consumer rating sites like Kudzu and Google Local fit in to the picture as well. I close with a brief description of what GuildQuality does to help boost our members’ presence on the web and participation in the online dialog. The talk lasts an hour.

UPDATE: Following are the answers to questions asked by attendees, that we didn’t have time to answer during the webinar:

“How much time do you spend on all this social media stuff?” I am our company’s primary marketer, and it is safe to say that I’m also the face of the company. Including the time I spend writing our blog (which provides 95% of the content for our newsletters), I probably spend fourty five minutes a day on social media for GuildQuality. Most of that is our blog, a good bit is with Twitter, and the remainder is with LinkedIn.

“How do you link Flickr to Facebook, LinkedIn or Twitter?” Facebook and Plaxo have some built in widgets that enable you to auto-feed your Flickr photos to your personal account. I don’t believe Facebook can do that yet for Company Pages or Groups. LinkedIn does not offer a way to connect to your Flickr account. You can set up your Twitter account to automatically post a tweet of Flickr uploads (or blog posts, or anything that can have an RSS feed) with Twitterfeed. Detailed instructions are here. Twitterfeed isn’t the only game in town, but it is what we use, and it’s worked fine for us. It is also worth noting that Flickr’s terms of use explicitly prohibit commercial uses, so if you intend to try and sell stuff with Flickr, make sure you read this.

Regarding Facebook Groups versus Pages (for your business presence on Facebook), one of the audience members added the following comment, essentially restating more emphatically my counsel to use Pages: “The skinny from those at Facebook is that much more energy (from the company) is going into Pages and Groups are fading to the background.”

“What are your recommendations for Security Settings for Professional and Personal Facebook and Linkedin Sites? How much should you reveal on public areas Etc?” On my profile pages, I avoid publishing anything that I don’t want anyone to see, and so I go ahead and make everything public. If you are interested in publishing things that you don’t want others to see, I encourage you to really think about whether or not you ought to publish it. GuildQuality does have a private discussion group on LinkedIn that is limited to our members, employees, and others that are “close” to us. Keeping it private keeps it from being dominated by people trying to sell their stuff (sales pitches seem to dominate the public groups on LinkedIn). Flickr and YouTube offer privacy settings that enable you to share some personal things (pictures and videos) only with authorized users. I stick to my “don’t post it if you don’t want someone to see it” strategy with those sites as well, though I ocassionally “privatize” pictures/videos in which my children or wife are looking just too darn cute for public consumption.

“What are costs of these sites?” Most of the social media sites I described, including Yelp, are free. Kudzu (another consumer rating site) offers some premium services for a monthly fee. Flickr charges $20 per year for a premium account (which you will definitely need if you want to use it regularly). You can have a GuildQuality account for as little as $30 per month, and the more folks you survey, the more you pay. You can also pay a little more to increase the number of Listings and Examples of Work you post in your public Guildmember profile page.

“What are good apps to use on the iPhone for all of these links?” I probably do 90% of my Twittering when I’m standing in line, in the dentist’s waiting room, etc. The iPhone’s web browsing capabilities make it easy to get your geek on wherever you are. Yelp has a nice iPhone enabled website. I use the Twitterrific application for Twitter, and I understand a lot of people really like Tweetie. Facebook and LinkedIn both have their own decent iPhone applications.

“How does one setup a company page on linked in or facebook?” First, you’ve got to have a personal account with Facebook or LinkedIn. Assuming you do, and assuming you are logged in, click here for Facebook and here for LinkedIn.

The NAHBR today announced that for the first time since 2005, more remodelers are predicting an improvement in the market than are expecting a decline.

The NAHBR’s findings describe a positive trend that we also saw in our own Guildmember Confidence Survey from March.

Echoing the sentiment expressed in GuildQuality’s most recent Member Predictions & Strategies Survey, the NAHB’s Housing Market Index (a measure of confidence among new single family home builders) rose for the second month in a row.

In October of 2008, we polled our members, requesting their forecast into what’s going to happen with their businesses and what will happen in the market in general. We also solicited comments about their strategies and thoughts on emerging and waning trends. Shortly after that survey, I published a brief summary of all of the feedback (the Q4 08 summary is available here).

In mid-March of 2009, we repeated the survey, and I was pleased with the results for two primary reasons: tons of participation and commentary, and much more optimism than the Q4 08 survey. Click here to download the complete report.

While there’s lots more commentary about strategy and trends in the download, below is a single chart that succinctly describes the change in sentiment.

I thought there was a gem that bore sharing from David Alpert’s comments in Continuum Marketing Group’s recent newsletter:

Constraint, value, frugality, and getting a good deal are the new badges of honor and status symbols. [click here to read the newsletter]

The article’s point: It is high time to revisit your website (and really all of your marketing materials) to ensure you’re no longer using language that might have been effective in 2006, but is a turn-off to prospects in 2009.

Among my favorite things about digital media: You can change it at any time without fear of tossing away boxes of un-used brochures. You can tailor your message to speak to the needs and desires of today’s customers, without fear of alienating tomorrow’s — but only if you keep your language fresh.

Replacement Contractor Magazine interviewed Francis Harvey & Sons (Worcester, MA) and Wooden Window (Oakland, CA) about customer satisfaction surveying. Both were kind enough to share their experiences with GuildQuality.

Here’s what Bill Essert had to say about why his company signed on with GQ:

I’d had enough pain,” says Bill Essert, president of Wooden Window, a California company that makes and installs its own custom wood windows. In-house efforts to solicit customer feedback on jobs lacked urgency, continuity, and follow-through, Essert says.

We serve all segments of the building and real estate profession, and we watch the trends within our own membership. It was no surprise to me that remodeling has dramatically gained market share in residential investment. What did surprise me, however, is that in Q4 2008 more was invested in home improvement than any other segment. (courtesy of CalculatedRisk)