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

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!

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 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.

This weekend, we launched the GuildQuality API. The API enables our regular members (association accounts are not yet supported) to re-purpose GuildQuality survey feedback in any format they wish. As an example, you might be interested in displaying your latest GQ stats in your company’s intranet. With the API, you can build a table that displays your up-to-date key metrics or most recent survey responses.

Super Users and Admin Users can access the API via Account Settings in Preferences.

We’ve created the API for a few reasons:

First, we wanted to help you pull your GuildQuality feedback into the other softwares that you use. We firmly believe that the single greatest thing you can do to improve your performance is to communicate your feedback throughout your team. The API will help you get it out of your account and into the hands of the men and women that care for your customers.

Second, we field a TON of requests for customization. Many of those requests are for improvements that would benefit all of our members. When we field those, we add them to our engineering pipeline, and eventually they’ll see the light of day (the API itself is a good example of a member-requested enhancement). But many of those requests are for reports that would be interesting and useful to a small subset of our members. The API gives those members a viable option for taking the ball and running with it themselves.

Lastly, the API opens a number of doors for us. Initially, it will be a one-way-out system. Meaning it will enable you to take data out of the system and re-purpose it as you see fit. Ultimately, we envision expanding the API so that you can also write to your account from other systems — i.e. updates to customer records in Peachtree or Salesforce will update your customer records in GuildQuality. That’s a ways off, but this is a big step in that direction.

The long term goal is, as always, to make it easier for you to use and get value out of your membership in our community of quality.

Update: The new GQ badge went live on March 10. Click here to add one to your company’s website.

We will soon introduce a new and simplified way for our members to promote their membership in our community of quality: GuildQuality badges.

How do the badges work? Members can include a GuildQuality badge in their websites to connect directly to their member profiles. The badges are also dynamic, meaning the image and link changes depending on the marketing preferences you select in your account. For example, if you’ve not been publishing your customer feedback and you decide to make it accessible, the image will change to indicate that people can “View Customer Feedback.” If you’ve been a Guildmember for some time, and finally win a Guildmaster Award, the image will change to reflect that you are an award winner.

Why should you use a badge? Using a badge (en lieu of a simple link to our site or your profile page) will help you in two primary ways. First, our system will magically recognize which members are using their badge, and they’ll be promoted more prominently in our member directory. Second, using the badge will help us to present a consistent image of GuildQuality to the general public, thereby raising awareness of the brand and increasing the value of your membership.

Stay tuned for word about the introduction of GuildQuality badges!

On December 3, GuildQuality hosted a webinar to review some of our marketing resources. Here is the recorded video. (33 minutes)

This webinar is for builders, remodelers, and developers who’d like to learn how to take advantage of our marketing resources and for those who need a refresher on the subject. We have a number of tools that help our members enhance their online presence and better articulate their quality of service for prospective customers.

In addition to reviewing our complimentary marketing services (like Customer Reports, Member Profiles, Listings, and our integration with a number of social media services), we also discuss prospect surveying.

12/9/09 UPDATE: Click here to view the recorded webinar.

A few weeks ago, I was spending some time with a number of our members. During our discussion about GuildQuality, their businesses, and state of the market, I was surprised to learn that many of them weren’t aware of our fantastic marketing resources. Upon learning more about what we offer, they encouraged me to get the word out via a webinar.

Webinar: December 3rd, 11am Eastern

On December 3rd, at 11am Eastern, I will be hosting a webinar tutorial for our builders, remodelers, and developers who’d like to learn how to take advantage of our marketing resources and for those who need a refresher on the subject.

We have a number of tools that help our members enhance their online presence and better articulate their quality of service for prospective customers, and I’m excited for the opportunity to share (or re-share) those with you.

In addition to reviewing our complimentary marketing services (like Customer Reports, Member Profiles, Listings, and our integration with a number of social media services), we’ll also spend some time discussing prospect surveying (which now accounts for 15% of our total survey volume!).

With me will be Laura Summerlin (our Member Services Director) and Mark Miles (our COO).

Click here to register for our 1 hour webinar.

We’ll soon begin field testing a new component of our service, and we’re looking for beta testers. Please let us know if you’d like to test it out. I promise it will be painless and require a negligible amount of your time. And hopefully, you’ll find it enjoyable and interesting.

12/3 Update: Consumer Accounts (the working title is GuildQuality Home Book) are now live. Click here to read more and sign up to help us beta test the service.

In early December, we’ll launch GuildQuality accounts for homeowners (if we move beyond a beta version, we’ll include apartment residents as well). Beyond that, about all we can say is that the homeowner accounts are designed to make it easier for people to care for and improve their homes.

Please click here to let us know you’re interested in experiencing them first hand. Anyone can ask to participate in our Beta launch (you don’t have to be a Guildmember to be involved), but we reserve the right to exclude anyone for any reason.

12/3 update: The GuildQuality Home Book is now live. Click here to read more and begin using our beta version.

In the last week or so, Angie’s List enabled non-members to provide business reviews. As a result, we’ve added them to the list of review services our members can have appear after their customers respond to a survey. You can read more about this functionality here.

Worth noting, unlike the other sites we link to, you can’t add an Angie’s List icon to your Profile Page, as publicly accessible company profiles are not available on Angie’s List. So while GuildQuality can help you encourage customers to talk about you on Angie’s List, we can’t yet link to an Angie’s List profile page of any kind.

Click here to manage which sites your customers see after they’ve completed a survey.

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?”