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

A couple weeks ago, we released the GuildQuality Twitter Client. I have to admit, I’ve probably been paying way too much attention to it, but a ton of our twittering members absolutely love it, so it seems our investment has been worthwhile.

This weekend, we pushed out a little tweak to the auto-tweet feature (or tweet-tweak, if you will) that added the city and state of the commenter into the auto-tweeted comment. After overcoming a tiny glitch, it now seems to be working perfectly again.

We wanted to include the city and state in the tweeted comment, so that the message would appear in local search results. If, as in the example above, someone is searching for what’s going on right now in Navarre, FL, and a comment from one of our members’ customers in Navarre has recently been posted, then folks will see it. That makes it easier for people to keep a finger on what’s happening in their area. Now, your customers’ voices can be a part of that dialog.

If you’re not familiar with Google’s “Updates” search, you can learn more here.

Aug 10 Update: See how we’ve juiced this feature up to help with local search results or check out the most recent comments shared by our members via the GQ Twitter Client.

Before today, you needed to go through a few gyrations to automatically tweet the comments you’ve published on your Customer Report (click here to read more about publishing comments). No more! GuildQuality now offers a seamless integration with your Twitter account. If you use Twitter for your business, check out the video below to see how it’s done.

Log in to your account to get started, or read on for more information.

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Visitors to GuildQuality’s website can now search the pictures of your work to find inspiration for their next remodeling project, custom home, or new home purchase.

Early this morning, we made it easy for you to tag each of your pictures with descriptive words and phrases to help visitors in their searching. Tags enable us to organize the images so that we can return the right ones when people are searching for some kitchen inspiration or considering building a custom home. Or maybe they’re thinking about a new pool or updating a bathroom.

Also worth noting, the tags you add to your pictures become the images’ alt attributes. These words help search engines understand what the picture is all about. Previously, our images had no alt attributes. With the addition of these tags, GuildQuality’s members’ pictures will begin to turn up in search engine results.

That was the good news. Here’s the bad news: While we “seeded the field” by tagging a bunch of pictures today, there are still more than 1,500 pictures that have yet to be tagged. Tagging yours will only take a few minutes, so click here to go the marketing admin section of your account, and start tagging!

Remember: If you don’t add tags, it will be harder for people to find your pictures.

The picture above is a behind-the-scenes progress shot of the next enhancement of our public website.

Since January 1, our members have added more than a thousand pictures of new homes, remodeling projects, and communities to their GuildQuality Profile Pages. During that time, we also increased the number of images that our premium members can publish for free — first from 45 to 150, and then again to 375 a few weeks ago.

Here are some typical examples of those pictures.

But despite all these beautiful pictures, I feel like we’re kind of hiding them — they don’t yet have descriptions or tags, and people must make a few clicks from our home page just to get to the first picture. That will soon end.

We’re making these images more prominent and searchable on the home page. They’ll also be tag-able and index-able. We’ve long been sharing the customer feedback histories of our members. Our project profiles enable us to share more details about their work. With this enhancement, these descriptions of their work — new homes, remodeling projects, and communities — will become that much more engaging and useful to anyone who is interested in buying, building, remodeling, renting, or maintaining a home.

P.S. We’ve been making frequent improvements to our members’ profile pages for a long time now. If you’d like more background on profile pages, check out this post from a couple years ago.

A couple months ago, we increased the number of free project profiles our members could publish from 1 to 10. We just raised it again to 25. So publish away!

We’re thrilled that you’re sharing so many beautiful pictures of remodeling projects, new homes, and communities. We’re increasing the limit for two reasons: 1) I think these pictures are great and I’d like to see even more; and 2) We’re working on some improvements to the site that relate to project profiles, and the more that are in there, the better it will be for both our members and visitors.

Almost two months ago, we increased the number of complimentary listings available to members from 1 to 10. Thereafter members have been publishing examples of their work and uploading photos like crazy. Since early March, we’ve climbed from maybe a few dozen listings with a couple hundred images to more than 160 examples of work and homes for sale with over 1,200 pictures.

Here are a few of my favorites:

New wood shingles on an historic house in Sparks, MD

Beautiful timber framing examples from churches, homes, kitchens and restaurants

Historic renovations from in and around Evanston, IL

Click here to view all of them, and here to add additional project profiles to your company profile.

This afternoon, we crossed the 1,000 image threshold in our member’s listings. Case of Birmingham pulled us over that milestone when they fleshed out the examples of their award-winning work with dozens of beautiful pictures of their bathrooms, basements, and kitchens.

We saw a dramatic increase in members publishing examples of their work and homes for sale after we increased the number of complimentary listings that companies can publish from 1 to 10.

In January, I previewed the new GuildQuality badges. And as of last night, they are ready for you to add them to your company’s website. Click here to get started.

A few great things about the new GQ badge:

1) It’s smart like a chameleon. If you publish your customer report, it instructs people to “view customer feedback” and links to the report. If you don’t publish the report, the badge instructs people to simply “view member profile”, and directs traffic to your profile page. Also, if you’re not a Guildmaster Award Winner when you add it, but you earn that recognition later, the badge automagically changes to reflect the accolade. And if you ever decide to cancel your membership, the image will mysteriously and unceremoniously disappear from your site.

2) People will recognize it. It’s designed to give a consistent representation of the GuildQuality brand across our entire membership.

3) It plays favorites. The badge communicates with the GQ system and rewards those that use it with higher ranking in our membership directory.

4) It can save you some money and earn you prizes. To celebrate the launch of the new badges, we’re giving a credit of $50 and a koozie to the first 10 members that add it to their site. So forward these instructions to whomever manages your website, and ask them to set you up!

3/15 Update: A bunch of members jumped right on this and added the GQ badge pretty quickly. Way to go! We hurdled the 10 member goal in two days. As of this morning, we’re at about 20.

If you are the customer of one of our members who publishes their customer report, then you’ll see this form right after you complete a survey by mail or email. This is also the form you see if you return to your survey response to view it at a later date (six percent of all respondents return to view their response — I suspect most of these are spouses, checking up on how their significant other responded).

We’ve added an “auto-share” option to this form — it helps your customers share your customer report via Facebook or Twitter. If the respondent clicks on Twitter, they go straight to their twitter account with the following pre-loaded “tweet”:

The bit.ly link in the tweet will take people to your customer report.

If the respondent clicks on the Facebook icon, they go straight into their FB account, and your customer report link is pre-loaded into their status box.

This option only appears if you publish your customer report. Our intention is to help your customers share their good experiences with their friends and family. If you don’t know if your customer report is published, search for your company in our member directory. If you’d like to edit your customer report settings, click here.

You can now add your company’s YouTube channel to your member profile (and Vimeo, too). Click here to make that happen.

With just one click, you can now publish the comments you receive in your survey responses directly to your Customer Report. Those newly published comments will also appear in the GuildQuality Stream. Watch this 90 second video to see how its done!

May 25 Update: We just upped the limit even further to 25.

Your member profile allows you to publish pictures and descriptions of your work, communities, and homes for sale. We call these “listings”. Previously, we’ve allowed every member to publish one listing for free, and we’ve charged extra for more than 1.

Today, we raised the “free” limit to 10 25 listings.

So if you haven’t created a bunch of Listings, what’s stopping you? Click here to log into your account and be taken directly to the Qlist management page. From there, simply click “Add a New Qlist Listing�, and you’re off to the races. It takes just a couple minutes and is very straightforward.

You’ll notice that our members with listings generally appear higher in the default sort order of the member directory. Amount of content is one of the things that determines the ranking of member profiles. The other two are recency of surveying and whether or not the member uses the GuildQuality badge.

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.

We’ve recently upgraded GuildQuality’s member directory and member profiles to include an activity stream with each member’s newly published information. We’re calling this the GuildQuality Stream. This enhancement serves two primary purposes:

First, the stream enables visitors to see more information about our members, and help them get a better understand of what you are all about. When your customer report gets updated with more survey feedback, when you add a listing, when you flag a customer comment to be published, when you publish another blog post, when you post something new on twitter — all this content streams into the GuildQuality feed on our home page, as well as your own company specific feed on your profile page.

Second, we’ve added RSS to each of the streams, as well as your customer report. This enables you to grab all of your company’s activity or newly published customer comments and stream them wherever you want. You can auto-tweet your published customer comments, feed your activity into your company intranet, or simply subscribe to it via Google reader or any other RSS reader. The idea is that we’re making it easy for you to stay updated, and even easier to share it with the world.

To get a taste of what all this means, check out GuildQuality’s updated home page and our own member profile.

For a run down of all the specifics, as well as instructions on how to take advantage of it all, read on: (more…)

David is putting the final touches on an enhancement to your member profile page and the main GuildQuality home page. The picture above is a snapshot from the updated home page.

The home page will have an aggregate feed of all member activity, and each member’s profile page will show their own company’s activity. If you publish your Customer Report, your personal activity feed will display when you’ve received survey responses (i.e. when the Customer Report is updated with new feedback). If you use Twitter or have a company blog, the activity feed will also display your company’s posts and tweets (refreshed on the hour).

The objective is to help visitors to your profile page get a better understanding of what your company is like, and also help you to broadcast your activity on a larger scale.

We’ll also be adding: RSS to each activity feed and your customer report. The Customer Report RSS feed will capture your newly published customer comments. So using that feed in conjunction with a service like: TwitterFeed will make it easy for you to auto-post those customer experiences to your Facebook Fan Page or company Twitter account.