GuildQuality

We’re thinking a lot about maps and geographical relevance these days. While our release of GQ Maps may have attracted all of the attention, I’d like to point out a tiny little change that may be harder to notice:

We just added to your profile pages a list of the cities and states (and Canadian provinces or territories) in which we’ve surveyed customers. For many of you, this would have turned into an impenetrable list of a zillion locations. As such, we pared it down to show only the 10 cities in which most of your surveying has occurred.

To the right is an image showing how that looks on GuildQuality’s own personal profile page. Unless your clients are all over North America, your profile page probably won’t list as many locations.

The addition of the city text serves two related purposes: First, it helps your profile’s visitors see where you’re active (just like GQ Maps). This gives people more context, and helps them to better understand what all this means. Second, it helps search engines have a better idea of where you’re active. Over time, I expect this to help the little web scouring robots to return your profile pages more frequently in search results for relevant phrases like, “remodeler madison, wi”.

This afternoon, we launched GuildQuality Maps. You can now opt-in to displaying the location of all of your projects (as well as the comments and reviews you’ve received in your survey feedback) on a map on your member profile page. Check out GuildQuality’s own map here.

Activate your map: To activate your map, visit the marketing section of your account. You’ll find more detailed instructions about turning it on at the end of this post.

Here’s how it works: For our members who’ve activated their map, visitors to their member profile page will see a cool little map in the sidebar:

Time frame displayed: This little sidebar map shows all the reviews and comments published on your profile page. So if you’ve set your profile page to display everything from all-time, visitors will see a little marker for each of those comments going back to your start with GuildQuality, but if you’re profile page is set to display only the most recent year of data, the map will show only the most recent year of markets.

Seeing reviews and published comments: Visitors can click on any marker to see the review or comment that’s associated with that project, or if there are more than one associated with that location, they can scroll through all of them.

Zooming in: Visitors can enter their zip code (postal codes work for Canada) to zoom in to whatever location they like. And if they click “Enlarge Map”, then an image like that at the top of this post pops up. When viewing the larger map, visitors can toggle between showing markers for ALL of your projects in the system, or only those with comments or reviews. Projects without reviews or published comments show up in gray, published comments show up in blue, and reviews show up in blue with a shiny gold star.

Obfuscation of locations: We don’t display customer contact info with the markers (in the case of reviews, we include initials or first name and last initial), but if you’d like to add to the privacy we afford your customers, you can choose to show only an approximate location of their project. In your map settings, if you select “Display approximate locations,” we’ll round the longitude and latitude of your locations to the third decimal, thereby making the marker locations +/- about 350 feet, rather than exact.

How to activate your map: Ready to turn yours on? It’s easy! Log into your account and go to the Marketing Admin, then the Customer Report tab. You’ll see the map settings on the right in the sidebar.

Click “Activate Map” (and if you like, click “Display Approximate Locations”), and then click “Update Settings.” Then check out your map!

What’s next for GuildQuality Maps? In all honesty, this is just Phase 1. We’re presently upgrading the navigation of the marketing section of the GuildQuality reporting application. When we finish, you’ll be able to embed a version of your map on your own website.

Two weeks ago, we introduced GQ Mobile, in which we optimized the most frequently viewed pages in our reporting application for iOS, Blackberry, and Android browsers.

On Friday, we extended the pages optimized for mobile to include the form that recipients use to complete a survey.

To the right is a screen shot from my iPhone of a survey from our test account. As with our regular survey, the mobile version prompts respondents to provide ratings on all the major aspects of the building, remodeling, purchasing, or renting experience, and makes it easy for people to share additional comments on each question.

The final part of this mobile project will be complete in early December, when we add QR codes to our redesigned survey mailers.

Mobile is a big deal. In the last 30 days, 20% of visitors to GuildQuality’s reporting application have arrived via a mobile device. Our percentage of mobile visitors has been climbing by about ½% every month. iOS devices (especially iPhones) dominate usage, constituting more than half of all recent mobile visits. Next comes the Android users, then Blackberry.

Mobile devices make the real-time delivery of our survey feedback even more useful. About 70% of customers respond to our customer satisfaction surveys, and GuildQuality delivers their feedback in real-time, via an email notification to our members. People tend to review those responses almost immediately, enabling them to take immediate action if necessary. That, coupled with the high response rate, is a big part of how we help our members reinforce their culture of quality.

[Not surprisingly, we use our own app to survey our members, and I probably use my iPhone to view 80% of the survey responses we receive from GuildQuality's own member satisfaction surveying.]

With all that in mind, I’m pleased to announce that we’ve optimized the GuildQuality reporting app for iPhones, Androids and BlackBerries. Here are a few screenshots from various devices:

We’ve optimized the most commonly visited pages for mobile: Login, Survey Response, and Dash. If you want to use the full-featured app while surfing on a mobile device (to dive into analytics), click on “View Full Web App at the bottom of each page.

With this project under our belt, we’re now optimizing the the actual survey form that your customers use to complete a survey online. So just as it’s now easier for you to view responses, it will soon be easier for your customers to provide them.

Not only are we power users of our own application, but we’re also power mobile users, so we’re especially excited about this little project.

P.S. We engineered this in-house, but Jeff Tow is responsible for the excellent design.

Yesterday afternoon, we turned on the new GuildQuality Dashboard. The old dash is still live, but above it, you’ll see a prompt to check out the new dash. Please do!

Our goal with the new dash was to enable you to do and see as much as possible from the dashboard, and minimize your need to dive deeper into the account in order to see trends in performance. A few things you’ll notice:

1) We’ve added a Scorecard right on the dash. Click on “edit” and you can filter what’s being represented. To maintain super speed on the dashboard, this Scorecard is a lighter version of the the Scorecard page in the app, so when you want to dive deep into your data, you simply click on the Scorecard header on that module, and you navigate to the more robust Scorecard page.

2) Recent Responses are now vertically oriented. Switching from a horizontal ticker to a vertical ticker enabled us to more clearly display your feedback, and as an added bonus, you can click on “more” ad infinitum, to see older and older responses.

3) Publish comments straight from the dash (Admin users only). Next to each comment is a publish (or un-publish) button, so with a single click you can have a customer’s comment appear on your member profile page (here’s a link to ours). You’ll also see the little Twitter and Facebook icons that enable you to activate or deactivate your social media integrations with a single click.

We’ll keep the old dash as the default landing page for the next week or so. Then we’ll switch to having the new dash as the default, and give people the option to go back to the old one if they like. We wanted to get this out in the wild, and see how our members actually use it. Once it’s been out there for a while, we’ll make one final round of enhancements.

I haven’t been able to figure out how to produce a single page to display all the comments shared by our members on Facebook, but Twitter makes it pretty easy: Check it out via this link. And below is a screen grab from this afternoon. Here’s a blog and video post describing how our integration with Twitter works.

A couple weeks ago, we received the following comment in a review from one of our members about their experience with GuildQuality:

After placing the GQ button in several places on our site and large-type testimonials at the top of most pages, our conversion rate literally doubled overnight, because we were now pushing TRUST on the site instead of “look at me, I’m wonderful!”

Nice! Here’s more about our GuildQuality Badges.

Early last year, we introduced a standardized GuildQuality badge for members to use on their websites. Over the last few months, we’ve been tweaking the badge design to make it more usable, flexible, and attractive when presented on a wide variety of websites. As of today, the new badges are available for your use.

We’ve abandoned the wide format in favor of a circular format that also has a transparent background and a white image outline. This makes it legible regardless of your website’s background color. We’ve also made it easy for you to choose between a larger size (100×100) or a smaller size (65×65) — the images shown here are 100×100.

As with our original badges, there are a few great reasons to use the GuildQuality badge (and the code we provide along with it):

1) It’s smart like a chameleon. It links directly to your member profile page and your customer feedback. 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.

So how do you get started? To add the GuildQuality badge to your website, or to download larger high-rez version for use in print, visit the Logos tab in the Marketing section of your account.

If html frightens you, forward this blog post to your website’s caretaker, and he or she can make it happen in five minutes (they’ll need to be a GQ “admin” user; “normal” users can’t access the marketing section of your account).

What about the old badge? For those who are using the old GuildQuality badge, it’s still live and functioning. Keep using it if you like, or grab the new code from within your account to update your website with the new image.

What are some other ways you can incorporate GuildQuality into your marketing? Check out this post for some additional resources.

Yesterday, we updated the notifications options in your account to enable admin users to opt-in to survey activity notifications, and specify how frequently they’d like them delivered (weekly, biweekly, or monthly).

The notification emails include handy links to the customer information for surveys we’ve sent since your last notification, as well as surveys scheduled to be sent in the near future. This notification is designed specifically for your administrative user(s) who is responsible for regularly sending GuildQuality your new customer information.

To set up your email notifications, visit Notifications in the Preferences section of your account.

About six weeks ago, we quietly launched print-friendly versions of our Member Profile Pages. Since that launch, we’ve heard from a number of members about the things that they’d like to see that we hadn’t included. Thanks for that feedback! Updated print-versions are now live.

When you click the “Print” button in the upper right-hand corner of your profile page, we execute some fancy gymnastics maneuvers to generate a PDF that’s smarter than what you’d receive if you simply selected FILE → PRINT. Most significantly, the new PDF is paginated — so that every page has the appropriate header/footer and comments aren’t broken mid-paragraph. The bars that summarize your published  performance metrics only display on the first page, below which we show all your reviews and published comments. Of note, for formatting reasons, if you publish more than 10 metrics, the PDF only displays the first 10. If you like, you can rearrange the display order of your metrics in your account.

Today, I happened to notice that the reviews we’re receiving in our members’ survey responses are now showing up in search results. It looked to me like a star average/summary now appears alongside the profile page of every member that’s 1) opted into reviews and 2) received at least one review.

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Aug 1 Update: Late last month, Google dramatically reduced its emphasis on third-party reviews in Google Places pages. Here’s their official statement. As noted below, GuildQuality reviews were showing up near the top of Places pages. Since that change, Google has now moved the reference to the bottom of the Places pages, with a link to the number of reviews received by the third-party. GuildQuality Reviews continue to show up in Google searches.

About ten weeks ago, we launched GuildQuality Reviews. Members who choose to opt in to Reviews have an additional question appended to their customer satisfaction survey, asking respondents to provide a review if they’re interested in sharing their experience with the whole world.

Since we launched Reviews, more than 1 in 5 of our survey respondents have shared a review. Initially, those reviews were only being published on each members’ profile page. They’ve recently started finding their way into search results and onto our members’ Google Places Pages. Some examples:

When a prospective client searches for “Roberts Construction Group, Evanston, IL,” they now see something like this:

Hey, how about that! Roberts Construction Group has 16 reviews. And when they click on either of the two links highlighted by the red arrows, they see something that looks like this:

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We have a couple tiny tweaks to make to our new GuildQuality overview video, but I couldn’t wait any longer and had to get it out there in the wild. Many thanks to Daniel at Friendly Human for the excellent production!

In our Newsletter from March, you’ll find our Q1 Member Prediction Report, an article on the benefits of transparency and an overview of our new features.

Subscribe to our newsletter here.

Another video from our team, this time from Laura Summerlin, our director of member services. People join GuildQuality expecting to receive real-time customer feedback and powerful performance reporting. But what surprises new members the most about GuildQuality? It’s all the additional things they can do with their membership.