The latest news from GuildQuality.

On June 21, HGTVpro aired a great feature on Nashville-based remodeler and Remodelers Advantage Rountables member Trace Ventures. In the 4 minute segment titled “Unique Incentives”, Art and Martha Stinson describe how they use GuildQuality to incorporate customer satisfaction into their employee bonus program.

We’ve been waiting for this video to emerge on the HGTVpro website, and it’s finally here.

A great many of our members tie bonuses to customer satisfaction. Trace Ventures’ program strikes me as an excellent way to tie together customer satisfaction and profit with compensation. If you’re doing something similar, please share your story.

In advance of undertaking another major enhancement to GQ’s reporting system, Rob and David invested some time in a bunch of “little things.” They pushed these enhancements on Friday evening. Here are two of the bigger things that were on their list:

Remember Me. If you select the “remember me on this computer” checkbox when you login, you’ll immediately login without having to type in your username and password. Also, if you share a link from your account with another one of your users, they will go straight to that page if they have their “remember me” box selected — and if they don’t, they’ll go to the login page and land on your link after they provide their username and password. You can test that out by clicking on this link to a forum post about these enhancements.

Survey Response View. In a recent release, we dramatically improved the survey user interface for your customers, but we also inadvertently made it a little tougher to see all the project details. We corrected this with Friday’s release. So now, both your customers and you have an improved user interface on the survey view.

There’s a list of other smaller things (relating to permissions, required survey questions, project information editing, and overall system performance), and you can read details about all of them here.

We just released a new design for our survey. This new design shows up when a respondent is taking an email or phone survey. It also shows up when viewing a completed response. I’ve had a couple questions today about printing this new survey format. I figured it would be best to write up an entry here.

There are two simple things that need to be configured when trying to print the survey. The first is ‘Printing background images and colors‘ and the second is ‘Setting your left and right margins‘. You’ll only have to do this one time and your browser will remember these settings for you. The overwhelming majority of our users use Internet Explorer 6 and 7, so I’ll write up a how-to for each browser because the steps vary slightly. If you do not know if you use Internet Explorer 6.x or 7.x, you can find out here.

If you are using Internet Explorer 6.x, then follow these steps…

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This weekend, GuildQuality’s engineering team will roll out another system enhancement. This project improves a number of aspects of the surveying process. Most notably:

1) We’ve redesigned the web version of our survey to improve the look and feel. From a usability perspective, we made the comment options more obvious, and enabled people to clear answers after they’ve entered them.

2) We’ve enabled members to personalize the survey emails (much as they can with their mail surveys). Emails can now have customized subjects, introductory language, and personalized “from” and “reply-to” email addresses.

When we introduced survey mailers about nine months ago, our overall survey response rate bumped up a few points. Earlier this year, we made some tweaks to the email and mail delivery process bringing another nice little jump.

We expect this enhancement will bring more gains by improving the survey respondent’s overall experience — both with a more elegant survey design and a personalized message from the Guildmember.

To customize your email messages, log into your account, click on Customer Satisfaction > Survey Admin > Survey Settings.

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.

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.

Investing in growth during challenging times is the philosophy of many successful building and remodeling companies out there. When the market slows down, they speed up. I’ve seen as a characteristic among GuildQuality members the tendency to be a bit ahead of the curve, the willingness to face challenges head on, and as a result, these companies stay afloat when all around them others are folding or slapping stickers onto their trucks promoting some new skill. In talking to building professionals all across the country, one thing we’ve heard consistently from all sizes, types, and locations of our members is a stress on the importance of a strong, smart marketing push during market downturns.

I wanted to pass along a few tips on ways to use your GuildQuality tools to help strengthen your brand and promote your excellence to past, present, and future customers. Combining these things with your other marketing efforts should yield positive effects. Most importantly, these things are FREE– they are just some of the many benefits of being a GuildQuality member.

Customize your Qlisting
Add content to your Qlisting and use as it a reference piece. Include satisfaction scores, testimonials, a company bio, type of work you do, etc. Building your Qlisting helps your web-marketing efforts: linking to relevant content boosts your search results in search engines such as Google and Yahoo (this is called Search Engine Optimization). A stronger web presence brings your name and brand to your customers’ eyes and minds. The GuildQuality Qlist gets tons of trafficâ€��?about 800 hits a month. You can see how many people have viewed your company’s Qlisting via your Dashboard.

Incorporate your company logo
Add your logo to your Qlisting and put it on your survey mailers. Reinforce the strength of your brand and your commitment to quality and satisfaction. Both Qlistings and survey mailers look really slick when the logo is added. Check out this previous blog post on the 10 most visited Qlistings, and here’s a picture of our gallery of survey mailers. Both of these are easily uploaded right into your account.

Share your stats
Share your strengths with your clientsâ€��?let them know what to expect when working with your team. You can do this in a number of different ways, but one easy way is to print your Customer Report and include it in leave-behind material on sales calls. You can also link your Customer Report to your company’s website so that clients and potential clients can see your commitment to the customer experience.

Most importantly, share your results with your entire team. When it’s transparently clear what the company’s strengths and weaknesses are, you can work on improving the weak areas and promoting the strong areas. Holding your team accountable to their performance will result in a better customer experience.

For any additional info on these things, send an email to our Member Services team and we’ll help you out.

Over the last month or so, we’ve been beta testing a new feature among a small group of our “power users.”

The GuildQuality Marketplace is a directory of member-rated vendors, manufacturers, and service providers. Members can rate companies and comment on their experience with them, and they can review the feedback provided by other members. You’ll soon notice the new chapter in your account, and you’ll be able to see the latest ratings at the bottom of your dashboard.

So why are we launching a vendor directory and what does this have to do with customer satisfaction surveying? Our mission is to elevate the building profession to a stature commensurate with its importance in our communities. There’s the customer service side of that mission, which we’ve been addressing with our customer satisfaction surveying and performance reporting. There’s also a products, subcontractors, and manufacturers component, which we’ll begin to address with the Marketplace.

We intend for the Marketplace to reward companies that do a great job servicing our membership. If members tend to have a great experience with Window Manufacturer A and a poor experience with Window Manufacturer B, all of our members will know about it. That means WMA will be rewarded for their service with more business from our community, and WMB will have more incentive to enhance the quality of their service for every Guildmember.

Beginning tomorrow, we’ll expand our beta test to a wider subset of our membership. After another month or so, we’ll turn it on for all of our members. If you’d like to be a part of the beta test, simply let us know, and we’ll turn it on in your account.

We launched our survey mailers back in September, but it took us a few months to get them green. As of January 1, mailers are now made from 100% recycled paper that is 100% recyclable.

We don’t use a lot of paper around the office, and that which we discard, we recycle. However, the REAL paper usage at GuildQuality is in our customer satisfaction survey mailers. The above picture is of some of the mailers we send out on behalf of our members (that’s Luna the office dog, guarding the hallway).

Mailers come with a high-res logo and a personalized message from the member. Now they also come with minimal impact on the environment.

Fred Reichheld, author of two seminal works on customer satisfaction surveying and the correlation between service excellence and profitability (the shorter one: The One Number You Need to Grow; the longer one: The Ultimate Question), has a great blog about Net Promoter Scores, Surveying, and Customer Satisfaction.

This morning, I came across a discussion on survey response rates. Since our inception five years ago, we’ve promoted the need to achieve a high response rate. My logic (and this came from my days as a homebuilder and developer rather than any experience as a statistician) was that if you could get feedback from just about every customer, you could use it to tangibly and immediately improve the experience of every one of those respondents. We called that actionable feedback. A 20% response rate meant that you had no actionable feedback from 80% of your customers.

Also, from our personal experiences as respondents and surveyors, we knew that unhappy customers were less likely to respond to a mail or email survey than were happy ones. That meant low survey response rates were the equivalent of rose-colored glasses.

I’ve been very pleased to see the increased awareness and successful implementation of Fred Reichheld’s strategies, as it reaffirms a great deal of our underlying surveying and information reporting philosophy: A high response rate is important; Real-time feedback is critical; Information must get in front of all the right people; and GuildQuality must report it a manner that makes it easy to understand how well the business and its various employees/teams/divisions are performing.

With regard to survey response rates, Reichheld writes

[Though I would have once suggested that] response rates between 30% and 60% seem like a reasonable goal for a well-designed relationship survey. Now, I am convinced that these targets (which many consider radically aggressive) are actually far too low.

We go to great lengths to create a positive surveying experience for our members’ customers. Our philosophy is that we’d like to survey our customers in the way we’d like to be surveyed. So we give them lots of options to respond (email, phone, and survey mailers), and our telephone surveyors are super-nice people that work out of our Eatonton, GA office. Their primary goal is to positively represent our members.

That strategy is working for us and our members. While we aren’t yet at a 90% average response rate for everyone (Reichheld suggests that number as a great target), many of our members enjoy response rates well above 90%, very few are below 50%, and our overall average is slightly better than 70%.

You may have noticed some changes on our website. Two weeks ago, we went live with our latest redesign; an attempt to consolidate our messaging, simplify our navigation and yes… add a little bit of sparkle.

In the previous redesign (left top), we went for a simpler look; one that made access to relevent information easy.

In this redesign, we aimed at further simplifying the navigation and the messaging. We decided to consolidate all of our messaging and remove the “I am a…” aspect of the navigation. This dramatically simplified things. We also wanted to give our website a little more “umph”; that is to say, “umph” without sacrificing simplicity. Whenever we embark upon new functionality in our Customer Satisfaction applications, we expend a generous amount of time talking about how our users spend their time with us. In this case, it was no different. We added a little sparkle, but concentrated primarily on simplicity.

Some notable changes were also made to our Qlist and Guildmaster pages. We were after better “balance” on those pages. We moved a few things around, but nothing terribly dramatic as far as layout is concerned.

All in all, we are pleased with the improvements and hope that you all enjoy the changes.

After October 22nd, when you login to your GuildQuality account you will land on your GuildQuality Dashboard.

The GQ Dashboard is intended to provide a simple, yet meaningful overview of your account. The initial launch consists of 5 modules: “My GuildQuality Feed”, “Quick Links”, “Key Metrics”, “Recent Customer Comments”, and “Last 30 Responses”. Each user has the ability to customize their “GQ Dashboard” to best suit their needs. I’ll explain some of the modules below, but the best way to get familiar with the Dashboard is to start using it.

The “My GuildQuality Feed” module (above) is a real-time chronicle all relevent activity within the member account and the GuildQuality community. The feed provides users with an “up to the minute” view of surveying activity, member forum posts, GuildQuality news, important messages from our Member Services Team, and much more. This is a great way for our members to see what has happened in their account since their last visit.

The “Key Metrics” module, by default, provides a high level summary of your (and your peers’) “Response Rate” and “Recommendation Rate”. The Key Metrics module allows the user to add any, and as many questions as desired. To drill down to performance over the past 30 days, 90 days and 12 months, simply click on the question to reveal the staggered details. Very neat!

The “Recent Customer Comments” module provides a quick and easy way to see the most recent customer comments. Each row contains the customer name, the question name, the date of the comment and, of course, the comment itself. Users can click on the customer name to view the survey results in their entirety. It’s a quick and easy way to see why customers are saying what they’re saying.

In tandem with “Recent Customer Comments”, the “Last 30 Responses” module (left) provides users with a graphical representation of “Scorecard” based scores for the last 30 responses. Like Scorecard, it also shows the average score of the current view. Very quickly, one can see where they’re doing well and where they might be falling short. Is there a peak or valley? Simply click to view the survey results and find out why. This, again, is a very simple and powerful way to view recent performance.

If you’d like a walk-through of the new GQ Dashboard with a Member Services representative, please attend one of the following Webinars:

Register | Thursday October 25, 1:00pm EDT
Register | Tuesday October 30, 9:00am EDT
Register | Wednesday October 31, 4:00pm EDT

Please email us if you have any questions.

We are very excited about unveiling the “GQ Dashboard” to our community of quality-minded members in the upcoming week. Cheers!

Last week, GuildQuality went live with GQ v2.6. Included were two great new additions; Mail Survey Cards and Survey Aliasing.

Mail Survey Cards go out to each of our members’ customers following the “ripe date”, the date on which their survey becomes active. On each card is a unique survey code and a url (http://www.guildquality.com/mysurvey/). For customers that have not completed the survey yet, they can go to the url provided, enter in their survey code (right), and complete their survey online. For customers that have already completed their survey, they are now able to go to the same url provided, enter in their code, and view their survey responses. In addition, our members are able to customize the messaging and logo printed on these cards. We sent our first batch out at the end of August and the response, thus far, has been great.

Survey Aliasing allows those members who build under different names depending upon the project type, development, or area, to create Survey Aliases. When a project is added, members specify which Survey Alias they would like used for each survey tied to that project. This alias is used in every step of the surveying process from email to phone and on down to Mail Survey Cards. When creating Survey Aliases, associated logos for each alias can also be uploaded. The alias and the corresponding logo are printed on each Mail Survey Card as they go out to members’ customers.

We are excited about these new features and look forward to seeing our quality-minded members use them.

You may have noticed some changes on our website. Getting the most attention this go-round was the Qlist. It was late last fall when we first introduced you to the Qlist. The initial release focused, primarily, on getting our members started on the creation of their Qlistings. As we watched member participation grow, discussions of interface redesign began to surface around the office with increased frequency.

Over the last few months, we’ve put a lot of thought and effort into this redesign. To dramatically improve our users’ experience, there were two very low hanging fruits for us to grab; the first being site navigation and the second; how to visually represent data richness. We realized that, in order for us to be successful, these two goals needed to be interdependent. We wanted to be able to reward our users! Once we decided on maps as the way to go for navigation, it became pretty obvious that color gradients (for states and regions) and sized data points (for regions) would be used to represent data richness.

Also related, but aside (from a design perspective), we needed to indicate, on the Qlists themselves, which Qlistings were more interesting to look at than others, so, we also added a column headed ‘Qlisting’. This field also contained sized data points (middle dots) which scaled in size based upon a little algorithm which determined the richness of the company’s Qlisting (Hint to Guildmembers: publish as much material as you can).

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