Archive for the ‘GQ features’ Category

Member Feedback WordPress Widget Updates

Featuring customer testimonials on your website is a great way to promote your company’s
quality online. In October of GuildQuality Member Feedback Widgetlast year, GuildQuality introduced a WordPress widget specifically designed to showcase each member’s customer comments and reviews directly on their website.

Since it’s launch, our engineering team has been hard at work making enhancements. The following are some of the new improvements you’ll enjoy with the latest version of our Member Feedback WordPress Widget:

  • You have options! You can select to display reviews and comments,
    only reviews, or only comments.
  • Styling is now more flexible for members who want to do some custom programming.
  • The widget is more compatible, offering a new method to grab information from our server.
  • We squashed the bug! If you have fewer than 20 published customer
    comments and reviews, no longer will you see a stack of lines instead of responses.

Haven’t installed the widget on your site yet? If your website or blog is powered by WordPress, click here for instructions on how to get started.

If you’re a WordPress using Guildmember who has already installed the original version of the widget, you can update your setting within the Plugin section of your WordPress admin.

 

 

 

Boosting SEO with Customer Reviews

by Erica England

Online customer reviews are important to companies for a variety of reasons, one of which is search engine optimization (SEO). For homebuilders, remodelers, and home services contractors, where your company appears in a prospective customer’s search matters.  Many of our members indicate that they have experienced prospective clients searching to find a remodeler or builder and seeing authentic customer reviews and testimonials on their GuildQuality profile pages.

Geoff Graham, Founder and CEO of GuildQuality recently shared with Remodeling  how remodelers’ reviews help SEO, “Whether they’re good or bad, when reviews are appropriately formatted, search engines will recognize them and weight them with more importance. Google might say, ‘I can see this review, so I’m going to return this in the search results more frequently.’”

Generating new and authentic customer reviews consistently is also important to ensuring your company maintains a strong search return. Encourage your customers to share their experiences online, it will be compelling to both search engines and prospective customers. According to this Impact of Customer Service infographic provided by Zendesk, a whopping 88% of people have researched a company online, read reviews and consulted the customer feedback when making their purchase decision. At GuildQuality, we’ve developed tools to constantly generate fresh customer content online. Through our customer satisfaction surveying GuildQuality is able to gather authentic feedback for our members to share.

For more on optimizing customer reviews for search, learn how to boost your online visibility from SEO experts featured in Remodeling.

 

GuildQuality Surveys Get a New Look

by Erica England

Following the introduction of our newly designed reporting application in February, and the launch of Find a Member pages in March, GuildQuality’s development team focused their attention on upgrading our surveys. Now our members and their customers can enjoy a cleaner survey template.

In addition to improving the design, we also enhanced the printable version of the survey, and enabled members to view (and add) project photos directly from the survey response. Take a look at some example images of the template enhancements below.

What Your Customer’s Will See -  Our members’ customers will see a survey similar to the example below. The black text against the white background makes each question easy to read. Scores are made distinct with the new navy blue coloring.

New Survey Template
 

What You Will See – Members will see responses in a similar format. All project details are available, and now members have the opportunity to add project photos.

Survey with Photo View
 

As always, if you have any questions or suggestions about the survey template enhancements, please contact our Member Services team.

GuildQuality for the iPhone, version 1.2

by Geoff Graham

iphone-photo iphone-photoiphone-photo

Earlier this week, the third version of GuildQuality’s iPhone App (v1.2) hit the App Store. We launched the iPhone App late in 2012, and this release marks our second round of updates and enhancements. With 1.2, we focused almost exclusively on squashing bugs and speeding performance, so expect a snappier, bug-free application.

Here at GQHQ, we use our own software to monitor satisfaction among the members of our community of quality. I use our iPhone app multiple times per day (for reviewing responses in real-time, adding notes, seeing high-level trends, and publishing comments), and refer to the full desktop version for deep dives into our data.

Visit the App Store to download GuildQuality for the iPhone (it’s free). If you’re already using it, we’d appreciate you sharing your review.

HT to Mailchimp’s smartphones@ for the screenshots!

Launch: Find a Member Pages

by Geoff Graham

Find a GuildQuality Member

Last month, we introduced Find a Member pages to the GuildQuality public website. These pages enable visitors to search their area for members of our community of quality and see what sort of work they’re doing in which specific locations.

Why did we build Find a Member pages? Our goal with Find (as we’ve been calling it internally) is to help prospective customers find the kind of builder, remodeler, or home services contractor they’re looking for, and give them insight into the kind of experience they can expect to have if they choose to work with one of our members.

If someone is trying to find a contractor in Washington, DC, we make it easy to see where great contractors are working and what type of work they do. If someone is looking for remodelers in Charleston, SC, they’ll see where dozens of companies have remodeled hundreds of homes. If someone needs window or siding replacement in Atlanta, they can find some great exterior replacement contractors via GuildQuality.

Continue reading “Launch: Find a Member Pages” »

Map Out Your Customer Comments and Reviews

by Erica England

Embeddable maps are great marketing tools for a variety of reasons, one of which is SEO. GuildQuality’s Founder and CEO, Geoff Graham expanded on this topic in yesterday’s d5R post, “All Over the Map”:

Search engines are especially interested in reputable sites with relevant, dynamic content. The maps indirectly influence a site’s reputation by providing the type of content that other reputable sites are more likely to link to. The more that reputable sites link to your website, the more that search engines view you as authoritative.

We’ve recently created an embeddable map feature enabling our members to showcase where they have completed projects, along with their customer’s comments and reviews. The embeddable map feature is just one of the enhancements we’ve made that can help our members with their marketing efforts. With homeowners searching online for the right remodeler, homebuilder, or contractor, having quality tools to enhance your company’s presence online is important. A recent stat. shared by 540 SEO indicates that 64% of consumers search for reviews online before making a purchase decision. Through our surveying process, our members can collect authentic reviews, and utilizing our marketing tools (like the embeddable map) they have the opportunity to share those reviews with potential and current customers online.

Take a look at some of these early GuildQuality map adopters for inspiration to get started: Taylor Construction, HomeFix Corporation, and HomeScapes of New England.

Are you a GuildQuality member ready to map out your customer comments and reviews? Visit the public profile section of your account to find your unique embed code.

Webinar on 3/20 at 3pm EDT: Behind-the-Scenes Look at the New GuildQuality

by Erica England

The best builders, remodelers, and home services contractors in North America rely on GuildQuality to help them deliver an exceptional customer experience. Since our launch in 2003, we’ve dramatically expanded the breadth of our services: Now more than 1,000 companies use GuildQuality to monitor, improve, and articulate the quality of service they provide.

Mark your calendar for March 20th, GuildQuality’s Founder and CEO, Geoff Graham will be hosting a brief webinar to share his vision for the company and showcase recent enhancements made to our reporting application and marketing tools. Reserve your seat online to explore the new GuildQuality on March 20th at 3:00 EDT.

About Geoff Graham and GuildQuality:
In 2003, following a successful career in homebuilding and real estate development, Geoff launched GuildQuality to help quality-minded builders, remodelers, and home services contractors deliver great customer service and earn the recognition they deserve for their commitment to quality. 10 years later, GuildQuality now serves a diverse group of residential real estate and construction companies, from some of the largest homebuilders in North America to custom builders, remodelers, and specialty contractors of all types and sizes. As diverse as GuildQuality members are, they all share a commitment to delivering an exceptional customer experience.

An Elevated Design and Advanced Marketing Tools for Remodelers, Homebuilders, and Home Services Professionals

by Erica England

GuildQuality, the nation’s leader in customer satisfaction surveying and performance reporting for the residential construction industry, recently launched a complete overhaul of their application.

“Our vision was to dramatically simplify navigation and make it easier for our members to use. We wanted to update the design to bring a more modern look and feel to the application and take advantage of the technologies that have emerged over the past couple of years to improve user experiences,” stated GuildQuality-s Founder and CEO Geoff Graham. “We want GuildQuality to be a platform for continued innovation.”

Customer feedback drives GuildQuality. Improvement suggestions from GuildQuality members were the catalyst behind the company’s move to make changes. A few enhancements offered within the new GuildQuality include:

  • Embeddable Maps: Members now have the opportunity to display a map of customer comments and reviews on their company websites.
  • Vanity Urls: All members of GuildQuality have individual member profile pages to promote the feedback they receive from customers. Now members can create a vanity url from within their account to drive current and prospective customers to visit their profile page.
  • Photo Uploading for Individual Projects: GuildQuality members are known for their top-notch work. The application now enables members to upload images of that work alongside project information.
  • Improved navigation: GuildQuality has made it seamless for members to find the information they need within their account to be successful. Pagination was also added to improve response time within the application.

The new GuildQuality was debuted to the company’s members last week, and included a preview of additional enhancements to come later this year.

Since the company’s start in 2003, GuildQuality has been a software-as-a-service trail blazer in the residential construction industry. GuildQuality’s surveying process provides homebuilders, remodelers and contractors with the ability to turn customer feedback into usable information to improve their business. In addition to the new features mentioned, GuildQuality members enjoy a comprehensive reporting suite, and marketing tools that facilitate them to manage their reputation and expand their reach to potential clients.

Preview: The New GuildQuality

Next week, we’ll release a completely overhauled GuildQuality reporting application. Don’t fret: We’re not changing any major functionality. But we are dramatically improving the design, simplifying navigation, and adding a few new features.

Behind the scenes, we’ve made a whole host of less obvious enhancements that eliminate some of the accumulated drag that adds friction to the product development process. After years of relentless and rapid innovation, it was high time for us to step back and tidy things up. This is the sort of work that falls into the non-urgent but important category, and we’re glad to have it behind us.

We’re spending all of this week dotting our Is and crossing our Ts in preparation for releasing the new GuildQuality into the wild next week. In the next couple days, we’ll announce some dates and times for webinars during which we can provide you a guided tour. Stay tuned!

GuildQuality for iPhone, iPod Touch, and iPad.

by Erica England

Access your company’s Key Metrics, Scorecard, and more from your iPhone, iPod Touch or iPad! The GuildQuality App enables Guildmembers to easily access all of their customer survey responses, publish customer comments, and share notes with other members of their team.
Download the free App here.

Here’s a recent review from Guildmember Brad McCall, President of McCall Homes:

This app is great! We have been with GuildQuality for about a year and a half. They are constantly improving their offering, and this app is another welcome feature. Nice work!

If you’re already using the App, let us know how you like it. Share your rating on iTunes.