GuildQuality

How do Degnan Design Builders, Inc. and Creative Contracting Inc. keep their customers satisfied? By maximizing client feedback using GuildQuality! Check out the Professional Remodeler interview with both company owners here:

Congratulations to DreamMaker Bath & Kitchen, winners of the November daily5Remodel snapshots contest! With nearly 3,500 votes, Jeremy Thompsen of DreamMaker Bath & Kitchen is now the proud owner of a white 16G iPad 2, courtesy of GuildQuality.

DreamMaker Bath & Kitchen submitted this story about their clients Janet and Rob Beaumont!

GuildQuality member 1-800-HANSONS was recently named National Contractor of the Year by Replacement Contractor Magazine, a publication that recognizes the top window, siding and roofing contractors in the United States.

“We work very hard to provide our customers with the best products and service before and after the sale. In this industry it’s all about trust and we work very hard at earning and keeping the trust of our clients,” states owner and President Brian Elias.

Congratulations 1-800-HANSONS!

Southwest Exteriors was recognized today as one of Window & Door Magazine’s 2011 Dealers of the Year.  The full story can be found here.

A GuildQuality member since 2006, Southwest Exteriors has achieved a 98% recommendation rate and an 84% response rate to surveys.  We survey all of Southwest’s clients and sales prospects, and Scott Barr (owner) personally reads the feedback from every client.  As a result of this commitment to quality, Southwest enjoys one of the industry’s highest referral rates.

I think Geoff said it well when interviewed for the feature story, “The world would be a much better place if every business operated like Southwest Exteriors.”  Congratulations to Scott and the Southwest Exteriors team!

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.

GuildQuality is pleased to announce a partnership with Kohler‘s Leading Edge program.  Effective immediately, GuildQuality will provide customer satisfaction surveying for members of the program, enabling the plumbing contractor to 1) receive real-time feedback from clients, 2) evaluate business strengths and weaknesses, and 3) communicate performance scores to prospective clients.

The Leading Edge program is intended for “plumbers who demonstrate a commitment to their business, from the service they provide to the products they sell.”  Kohler has put together a unique offering including GuildQuality surveys, marketing and advertising tools, and online training. Following a successful pilot, we have two Leading Edge plumbers - Lakeside Plumbing and M/R Plumbing Mart – signed up as full members of our community of quality.

For more information, please visit our Kohler partner page.

For the third straight calendar year, GuildQuality will serve as the preferred provider of customer satisfaction surveying for the Pella Certified Contractor (PCC) program.  Since launching the relationship in early 2009, we have signed up over 75 PCCs in 18 states and have achieved a 74% response rate across all surveys.  Click here for a list of PCCs with active profiles.

Jim Kabel, of Case Handyman & Remodeling of San Jose recently summarized his experience with GuildQuality:

“GuildQuality has enabled our company to capture, reinforce, and recognize quality in and across our team. It enables us to keep a strong, healthy balance between quality and profitability by putting quality in a very measurable position with quantitative data. It is the single best short-term measure of our success in satisfying our clients on a daily basis. I consider it integral to our business.”

So, what’s new for PCCs from GuildQuality in 2011?  Two webinars are already scheduled: one focused on best practices in surveying and another focused on leveraging social media.  And, for those who have not yet done so, we offer PCCs a 20 survey trial of our service!

Congratulations to Thompson Creek Window Company for being recognized as Replacement Contractor Magazine’s Contractor of the Year.

In describing their outdoor event-based marketing, Jim Cory writes, “what’s unique isn’t the concept so much as the discipline to execute it successfully.” From our perspective, that discipline permeates every division of the company.

On the second page of Jim Cory’s interview with the key members of the Thompson Creek team, Rick gives a kind nod to GuildQuality’s role in helping them excel:

GuildQuality…has upped customer satisfaction survey return rates from 30% to nearly 80% and yielded a ton of data about potential weak points in Thompson Creek’s various overlapping systems.

Read all of Jim Cory’s article in Replacement Contractor Magazine.

Last week, a remodeler posted a question to NARI’s LinkedIn Discussion Group, asking her peers for advice about customer satisfaction surveying, and many of our wonderful members chimed in with their opinions. On Friday, I shared that thread in GuildQuality’s own discussion group and that seems to have attracted a few more Guildmember comments.

If you’re a member of NARI, I encourage you to check out the discussion — there’s thoughtful advice from many accomplished remodelers, at least ten of whom are GuildQuality members.

While the question was posted in a remodeling forum, I think it’s relevant to any business who surveys their customers, especially companies in the residential construction and real estate space. Here are my own thoughts in reply to her question — some of which were reiterated by the company owners who chimed in on the discussion:

1) Third-party surveying results in honest feedback. The old joke in customer satisfaction surveying is “If you want people to tell you what you want to hear, ask them yourself. If you want to hear the truth, have someone else ask them.” I am always surprised to learn that some builders and remodelers still hand out a survey at the closing table or the end of the job, watch the client complete it, and then brag about their 99% response rate and 99% recommendation rate. Hint: They are lying to you.

2) Response rate is important. As Fred Reichheld notes, lengthy and low-response-rate market research surveying is an altogether different animal than customer satisfaction surveying. Your surveying process is an extension of your service, so do it in a way that engages your clients rather than alienates them. In addition to keeping surveys succinct and relevant, we also give people lots of options to reply (email, phone, and mail). And so we never lose site of the fundamental requirement that our surveying process support the overall service experience, we give respondents an opportunity to share with us their feedback about completing our surveys. Here’s how we do it and what they have to say.

3) Take immediate action. If you sporadically survey your customers, and if only 35% of them reply, you can’t really rely on surveying to give you an accurate picture of performance, and it definitely won’t help you identify issues that need immediate attention. But if 75% of customers reply, and you survey everyone right after contract, close, near the expiration of their warranty, and on the anniversary of their closing every year thereafter, you’ve got a real system in place to monitor quality. And — even more valuable than the reliable trend reporting — you can count on your surveying to churn up real issues that need attention right then. Thankfully, that attention is just as likely to take the form of a thank you for a kind comment or constructive suggestion as it is to be a follow up to attend to something that’s not done to your standard of quality. And if you regularly survey long after the job is done, that check-in is likely to result in a referral or even more work with the same client. A key, however, is that you MUST take action. That means distributing your feedback to your entire team so that the right people can follow up.

4) Benchmark your performance. Lacking anything but reports about average referral rates among builders and remodelers, you might feel pretty good about an 86% recommendation rate. Not so fast. You want to be comparing yourself against the best in the business — not the average. In this market, only the best companies survive and thrive. You can read evidence of that here and here.

5) Don’t just file the feedback away in a drawer. There are all sorts of things you can do with these wonderful comments, and tracking performance from quarter to quarter or superintendent to superintendent is just the beginning. Nothing influences your prospective clients like the opinions and experiences of your past clients. So get that feedback out there where people can find it — whether that’s in a GuildQuality Customer Report, on Twitter, on Facebook, or wherever.

In our Newsletter from May, we announce our 2010 Guildmaster award winners, feature our Q1 Member Predictions Report, announce a new partnership with James Hardie Preferred Remodelers and more.

Subscribe to our newsletter here.

A few weeks ago, the good folks over at Startup Atlanta invited me and a handful of other real estate/construction/technology entrepreneurs to give a presentations about our companies, and answer questions from the crowd. Daniel at Friendly Human snagged me for this “exit interview”. Somehow, he managed to elicit a coherent statement about who GuildQuality is, what we do, and why we do it. What a pro!

What a great group of remodelers! Qualified Remodeler profiled 55 members among the 2010 Guildmaster Award Winners in their latest issue. From the article:

Today, during a housing downturn and slower economic times, satisfying customers can very well mean the difference between success and failure. If your phone has stopped ringing, it may have less to do with your success as a marketer than it does the lingering effect of past customers who are not willing to hire you again or those who would not be willing to refer you to a friend.

Qualified Remodeler goes on to share 55 quotes from each of the Guildmembers about their single best practice. Not surprisingly, the overarching theme in all those quotes is an unwavering dedication to delivering exceptional customer service.

In this month’s Remodeling Magazine, Ben Morey of Morey Construction and Martha Stinson of Trace Ventures shared how GuildQuality helps them reward and praise excellent service among their teams.

Morey says that perpetuating the client-feedback loop has been one of his “best tools� for maintaining morale and productivity. He shares survey results in meetings, and especially relishes placing printed copies of client comments on employees’ desks.

Thanks Ben and Martha, for sharing!

Susan Bady, Senior Editor of Custom Builder Magazine, penned an excellent article on Payne & Payne, NAHB’s Custom Builder of 2009. I caught a picture of the award announcement at the Custom Builder Symposium in November, and had the pleasure of spending a good bit of time with most of the Paynes.

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 contributors 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?”