GuildQuality

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:

(more…)

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.

Prior to launching GuildQuality Reviews, we piloted the feature with a number of our early adopter members. Far and away, their most popular request was for us to allow them to add their own responses to reviews they receive. And now you can! Watch this two minute video to see how it works.Adding a response to your customer reviews

Adding a response to your customer reviews from GuildQuality on Vimeo.

Late this evening, we’ll update our member profile pages with a new design. A significant part of this redesign involves the introduction of GuildQuality Reviews. Once our redesign goes live, your customers will be able to provide a public review of your company along with their survey response.

We’ve been piloting GuildQuality reviews with our own member surveying since late November, and in the last couple weeks we expanded our pilot program to include about 50 Guildmembers. From the surveying we’ve done with our Guildmembers during this pilot period, we’ve found that, when asked, roughly a third of survey respondents provide a review along with their survey response.

Why are we introducing GuildQuality Reviews? There are a number of reasons we’re introducing reviews. The main reason is that, for the members who want to leverage their customer feedback to strengthen their brand, our survey process presents a great opportunity to let customers share more (and more useful information) than they’re presently able to. Their published comments are already finding their way into consumer rating services like Google Places, and with the addition of GuildQuality Reviews, more robust, useful, informative commentary will make its way throughout the web.

(more…)

I take a lot of inspiration from the company 37signals. Their main product is a collaboration software called Basecamp (which we’ve used here at GuildQuality since late 2005). In addition to building great software, the 37signals team prolifically shares how they do things on the their blog, and the two principals have consolidated a bunch of their best posts into an exceptional business book called Rework.

It’s safe to say that a big part of their marketing is their sharing. They share how they do things, and people buy from them often because they’re as impressed with why they do what they do as what their software actually does.

A few months ago, 37signals launched their own internal tool to monitor happiness with support requests. They call it Smiley. For the first few months, Smiley was visible to the internal team only. Fried shares how it helps them improve, and how they’re taking it to the next level:

Smiley has had a tremendous positive impact on our overall customer service. We’ve learned a lot about what it takes to make a customer happy. And our customers are happier as a result. As it goes, if you want to improve something, measure it….Inside 37signals, everyone can see our customer service ratings. We have a dashboard that shows how we’re doing. It’s great. I look at the page a dozen times a day to see how we’re doing. When I pitch in on support I’m very conscious of my ratings. Knowing how you’re doing helps you do better….However, we want to go even further. We want to be held to even higher standards of excellence when it comes to our customer service. So we’ve decided to expose our customer service ratings to the world.

Check out the 37signals Smiley score here. Very cool. As our Guildmembers know, we’ve been enabling them to do something similar with their customer feedback since way back in 2005 (here’s our feedback from our members about our service).

We’re hearing a lot about transparency these days — it seems to be the new new thing. The 37signals move with Smiley is one more sign that transparency is here to stay.

Two big wins come from publicizing your customer feedback: heightened team accountability and heightened customer trust.

With your customers’ feedback out their in the wild, your team takes their job that much more seriously and your customers know that you do as well. Happy customers pay obvious dividends. And publicizing performance — warts and all — takes it to a whole new level. People see what kind of experience they can expect to have if they work with you, they see that you consider it a fundamentally important metric, they see that you care about all these great people who buy something from you, and, most importantly, they see that you’re going to care about them too.

Our Customer Report has been around for eons, and we’ve updated and expanded it from time to time. Hold tight, as we’re polishing off its biggest overhaul right now. I look forward to sharing it with you shortly.

P.S. If you feel like you’ve overdosed on business books, and want a fresh perspective, read Rework, by the owners of 37signals. For some extra incentive, check out this month’s Inc. Magazine — company founder Jason Fried is on the cover with the headline, “How to get good at making money.”

In our Newsletter from January, you’ll find our Q4 Member Prediction Report, tips on how to get the most out of your membership  a great feature about a miniature castle built in South Carolina and more.

Subscribe to our newsletter here.

In our Newsletter from September, you’ll find ways to integrate GuildQuality to your Twitter and Facebook accounts, why we switched the recommendation question in surveys from yes/ no to zero to four, our Q3 Member Prediction Report, and more.

Subscribe to our newsletter here.

Someone just asked me about the options for republishing GuildQuality customer feedback on their own site and elsewhere on the web. After a brief conversation, I forwarded him an email explaining most of the options. While typing it out, it occurred to me that we don’t have a single blog post describing these options. I’m officially rectifying that. As of September 10, 2010, here are the four major ways you can republish, promote, amplify, syndicate, or celebrate your GuildQuality survey feedback:

1) Facebook/Twitter

GuildQuality integrates with both Twitter and Facebook, making the comments you publish automatically appear in your Twitter stream or on your Facebook Page. Here are the details for integrating with either Facebook or Twitter.

If you’d like to see how other folks are publishing stuff in Facebook, here are the Facebook search results for “GuildQuality” (you must be logged into your FB account). Here and here are a couple examples of members that use the Twitter integration.

2) RSS feed of your customers’ published comments

Click on the orange RSS icon above the comments on any GuildQuality Customer Report (here’s our own). By pasting that url into any kind of feed reader, the reader will display all the newly published comments. Here’s a blog post about using GuildQuality’s RSS feed to syndicate customer comments.

3) The GuildQuality Badge

To add the official GuildQuality badge to your site, all you need to do is copy and paste a few lines of code. The code is unique to each member, and automatically generated when a company joins GuildQuality as a premium member.

4) API

This is for advanced technology folks. The API enables you to re-purpose your customers’ feedback in any format you choose.

You can now publish customer comments directly from your survey responses to your company’s Facebook Page. This works the exact same way as our Twitter integration.

We tested it with GuildQuality’s own Facebook Page late last week, and it’s now live for everyone.

To start publishing comments directly to your company’s Facebook page:

1) open up a survey with a comment you’d like to publish;

2) click on the phrase “Click here to connect your GuildQuality and Facebook accounts”; and

3) then choose whether you’d like to publish to your own wall of your company’s page.

You only have to authorize GuildQuality to publish comments to your Facebook Page once. Thereafter, each time you click “publish” next to one of your customer’s comments, the comment will publish to your Facebook page and to your GuildQuality Customer Report (and to your Twitter account if you’ve connected that as well).

Watch this video to see how it works:

How to publish your customer comments to your company’s Facebook Page from GuildQuality on Vimeo.

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.

(more…)

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.