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

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.

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?”

In the June issue of Qualified Remodeler, Ken Betz interviews a number of remodelers about how they ensure referral and repeat business.

Guildmember Neil Kristianson of Crimson Design & Construction says,

Really everything we do, from the first meeting to last, is designed to get us referrals. I believe that if done right the clients will go out of their way to help and you don’t need to offer incentives to get referrals. If you have to pay, how heartfelt is it anyway?

He also lists GuildQuality among his core strategies for staying in touch with customers and delivering a great service experience.

In the article, Betz also interviewed me about the benefits of surveying. He sought my counsel on what is the one thing a business ought do with their survey feedback to improve performance. I advised that companies should share feedback with their employees in real-time, so that they can start seeing how their actions influence the customer’s exerience.

When that starts to happen with a business – without even really putting any strategy into place – you end up creating a culture of quality. Employees get in tune with what their customers are thinking, and they begin to think about the job in terms of how it is impacting their customers’ perspective. We tend to see a huge jump in performance when companies start to survey customers.

Many thanks to Wooden Window (Oakland, CA) and Francis Harvey & Sons (Worcester, MA) for sharing with Replacement Contractor the advantages they’ve experienced in outsourcing their customer satisfaction surveying to GuildQuality. Among the reasons they site:

“In-house efforts to solicit customer feedback on jobs lacked urgency, continuity, and follow-through.”

“…before joining GuildQuality…company foremen would hand clients a survey form, and salespeople would be responsible for following up. If surveys came back, they often just ended up in a file.”

“Joining GuildQuality provided the company with a steady flow of feedback, both minor gripes and gratitude.”

“GuildQuality feedback is especially useful for exterior jobs, where homeowners are often not present when the job is closed out.”

Click here to read more.

In his June “Trade Secrets” article in Professional Remodeler, Jonathan Sweet talks with Dan Wiedmann about how his company uses GuildQuality’s customer report to help prospects understand what type of experience they should expect to have if they choose to work with Weidmann Remodeling.

It’s helped us tremendously. I get calls from people who have gone to our Web site first and based on the recommendation have put us on the list of contractors they want to talk to.

Worth noting, in February we updated the look and feel of the Customer Report. Those using the new report have more customization opportunities and are able to monitor traffic to their new report. This has been in place since February. Beginning on July 1, all the old Customer Report links will redirect to the new report page.

Later in the piece, Jonathan highlights another Guildmember, Renewal Design-Build, and their new job security guarantee. He reports that in the event of job loss, job relocation, or inability to secure financing, Renewal will refund 50% of the retainer paid by the client.

On June 21, HGTVpro aired a great feature on Nashville-based remodeler and Remodelers Advantage Rountables member Trace Ventures. In the 4 minute segment titled “Unique Incentives”, Art and Martha Stinson describe how they use GuildQuality to incorporate customer satisfaction into their employee bonus program.

We’ve been waiting for this video to emerge on the HGTVpro website, and it’s finally here.

A great many of our members tie bonuses to customer satisfaction. Trace Ventures’ program strikes me as an excellent way to tie together customer satisfaction and profit with compensation. If you’re doing something similar, please share your story.

In June, Remodeler Online published an article titled Remodeling: CSI exploring the hows and whys of project “autopsies”. Leah Thayer’s article talks about how to fix and, ultimately, avoid remodeling projects that suffer from budgeting and scheduling problems. She “autopsies” a project from soup to nuts, identifying “pulse points”; checkpoints in the project where diagnostics should be performed and issues aired out. Advanced Kitchens and Advanced Contractors, interviewed in this article, give GuildQuality the nod as their tool of choice to gather the feedback that they need for their autopsies. Gruesome indeed …

Last week, Remodeler Online again referenced GuildQuality in an article titled “Simple Bonus Systems“. In the article, Tim Faller explains how bonuses “can help field employees achieve quality and profits alike”. He says that evaluation of production teams in the field “requires a good feedback tool”.

Companies such as GuildQuality can help you establish criteria and conduct surveys. You might assign a simple monetary award to “grades” of a certain level – for instance, for every job that gets a top rating in 80% or more categories…

It’s great to hear about how our members are leveraging our tool and, as always, it’s great to hear people saying nice things about us.

GuildQuality collects a LOT of customer feedback. Lately, we’ve been interviewing around a hundred homeowners a day about their experience with one of our builders, remodelers, or real estate developers. We deliver that survey feedback, in real-time, to our members in a consistent, actionable, and succinct format. As a big added bonus, we also give them easy-to-use analytical tools to help them track things like the performance of their employees or their company’s performance in contrast with a highly-relevant group of peers.

Our mission is to elevate the building industry to a stature commensurate with its importance in our communities. There’s not many jobs that are more important than that of a homebuilder, remodeler, or developer. These are the folks that are shaping our built environment. They significantly influence both the way we live our lives today, and how we’ll live them for many decades (or even centuries) to come.

Given the importance of the building profession, I was pleased to see a significant trend emerge from a research project we’ve been working on. With the help of 15 remodelers and Remodelers Advantage, we’ve been able to make some judgments about the correlation between customer satisfaction and profitability.

We were trying to assess whether or not customer satisfaction impacted gross margin. Here’s what we found:

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GuildQuality enjoyed a prominent feature in July’s Remodeling Magazine, along with long-time members Classic Remodeling and Strite Design + Remodel. The article is a nice summary of why one should survey their customers, and how one should go about it.

“There is no greater indicator of your future success than your recommendation rate. This applies whether you build three high-end custom homes or 7,000 multifamily condominiums or do $1 million in remodeling.”

Congratulations to Austin Foster and the entire team at Construction Ahead for their excellent cover article in the September Professional Remodeler. The article discusses CA’s growth strategy, customer service philosophy, and how they use GuildQuality.

“I want everybody happy with my work. And you just try to push your guys to understand that and make sure they have that same mentality.”

Austin — thanks for the great mentions of GQ in your piece, and congratulations on the fantastic accomplishments of Construction Ahead in the last couple years.