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

GuildQuality was a finalist for the Rackspace FANATI Award for exceptional customer service. Alas, we didn’t bring home the gold. That honor went to PetRelocation.com. Their video is worth a watch:

These guys love what they do. If ever we need to move our pets, I’m definitely calling them.

The American College of the Building Arts is dedicated to educating the next generation of building artisans. Students at the college are learning both the craft and the profession of construction.

Visit the college’s site or read this recent Preservation Magazine article, and you’ll quickly see why we’d like to support their mission. In our own ways, we both seek to elevate the stature of the building, remodeling, and real estate development profession.

The college and its students would appreciate your financial support — and they’d also benefit from some inspiration. So here’s my appeal to you:

Please tell us why you have chosen this profession!

If 100 building, remodeling, or real estate development professionals share their story (in the comments here on this post, by replying to @guildquality on twitter, or on our facebook page) before the end of March, we’ll give $500 to the college. So please, give us your answer (no matter how brief), and ask others to do the same.

Note: I’ve reposted some comments that people have provided in other forums. I’ve tried to catch them all, but likely missed some. My apologies if I missed yours!

By clicking on the little orange “Share This” icon in the footer of every page on our website, visitors can easily share the page they’re viewing via email, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc. About 5 times a day, someone uses this little doohicky.

A few months ago, I posted our visitors’ sharing patterns. For those that are interested, here’s an update.

Email remains the leading method of sharing, followed by Facebook, and (assuming you don’t count printing) then Twitter.

Looking at the content shared, GuildQuality-specific pages (blog posts and pages describing our service) make up about 14% of the pages shared, and Member-specific pages (customer reports, Guildmaster interviews, and profiles pages) make up the remaining 86%.

If you aren’t sharing your GuildQuality Customer Report, and you have an interest in doing so, you absolutely should. Our customer reports clearly attract the most attention on our website.

Earlier today, I sent an email out to the super- and admin- users whose surveys allow for anonymous responses. I’m posting that email here for everyone’s reference.

Many of our members allow people to request anonymity in their survey responses. After careful consideration, we’ve elected to entirely remove this option for all new GuildQuality members, and beginning on March 15, we will remove the option for existing members as well.

Before deciding to make this change, we solicited feedback from the members of our GuildQuality LinkedIn discussion group. The overwhelming response was in favor of eliminating the option. Click here to read what they had to say, and to chime in on the conversation.

Every day, GuildQuality receives constructive feedback from people who need help resolving a problem with their home, remodeling project, or apartment. And every day, Guildmembers are using their survey responses to immediately respond to those that need assistance. Presently, many of our members allow people to respond anonymously. As a result, we often receive survey responses wherein the respondent has requested anonymity, but has also described a resolvable problem. And sometimes, an anonymous respondent will even request that a specific problem be resolved. In these instances, it is difficult and often impossible for the Guildmember to follow up and correct a problem. For this reason, we intend to eliminate the anonymous option altogether.

I do not anticipate that this will impact your survey response rate. We compared historic survey response rates among those that allow anonymity versus those that don’t, and found them to be identical. But more importantly, I expect this to increase the utility of the information we provide you, and the quality of service you are able to provide your customers.

Beginning on March 15, GuildQuality will eliminate the ability for survey respondents to request anonymity. When this happens, all prior respondents who requested anonymity will still have it, but future respondents will not be presented with that option.

If you are among our members who allow anonymity, and you prefer that we keep the anonymous question in your surveys, please let us know. Otherwise, you don’t need to do anything, and the anonymous question will disappear from your surveys on March 15.

On Friday, Rackspace informed us that, after becoming an award finalist earlier this year, we did not become the supreme super winner of their coveted FANATI Award. Rackspace has not yet announced the winner, and I hope to have the opportunity to congratulate them when they do.

I understand that Rackspace based their decision on two things:

1) Each candidate’s application video, and

2) The company’s customer satisfaction scores (compiled via Rackspace’s own survey).

Rackspace asked that a random 300 of our members be surveyed. 127 of you graciously responded (even though most of you had already responded to one of GQ’s own member satisfaction surveys).

On Friday, Rackspace shared with us a summary of the survey feedback you provided, and I’m exceedingly pleased to report that we did pretty well. In fact, the Rackspace survey showed us with a Net Promoter Score of a whopping 83.2%. That’s higher than the scores for top performing industry giants like Apple and USAA. It’s also higher than our similarly calculated GuildQuality Index (GQI) of 69% (YTD).

If you are interested in the Net Promoter methodology, you may want to read this brief post from late 2007, or check our Fred Reichheld’s book, The Ultimate Question.

As the weather in Las Vegas worsened, my confirmed hiker list dwindled, until Abe Degnan of Degnan Design Builders was all that remained.

Rain in Las Vegas turned out to mean snow at Red Rock Canyon, and as challenging as that sounds, it turned out to be wonderful. Click here to see all the pictures from our first annual GuildQuality hike. Abe is responsible for all the good photographs. I took the lousy ones.

A couple weeks ago, we applied for the Rackspace Fanati Award:

Here at Rackspace, we’ve built a reputation based on service, known to our customers as Fanatical Support®; our anytime, anywhere, any way approach to customer service. And we know we’re not the only ones who put customer needs first. That’s why we created The FANATI in 2007 to recognize one of our customers for valuing customer service as much as we do.

I was thrilled to hear that GuildQuality is among a handful of finalists. To determine the winner, Rackspace is presently surveying a random selection of our members (the irony!), as well as a selection of customers from the other finalists.

Rackspace is one of the companies we emulate for our own customer service, and being a finalist for this award is a big coup for our team.

Jan 6 Update: The meetup will be at 5:30 on January 19 at Tempo in the Las Vegas Hilton. For more details, visit the official meetup page.

On January 19 at 3:30 in South 221, Craig Schweikart (of Constellation Homebuilder Systems) and I are giving a talk entitled “Best Practices for Integrating Technology in Your Business�.

My portion of the session will cover how GuildQuality uses technology in both our operations and marketing. The show’s planners invited me to give the same talk I gave during November’s Custom Builder Symposium (I also gave a similar presentation at a couple of recent NARI events). I’ll be updating it to include some of my more recent finds, so even if you’ve seen it before, I encourage you to join us.

If you have interest in this session, my 1st annual IBS hike, a meetup at 5:30 on the 19th at Tempo (in the Las Vegas Hilton), or just getting together for a cup of coffee, please let me know!

Since the fourth quarter of 2008, we’ve regularly surveyed our members, asking their opinions about the near term future for both their company and the the construction and real estate industry. (click here to view all past reports)

In each Member Predictions Survey, we ask our members to answer two primary questions:

“Relative to the previous six months, what kind of change do you expect in YOUR COMPANY’S PERFORMANCE over the next six months?”

“Relative to the previous six months, what kind of change do you expect in THE MARKET over the next six months?”

As in prior quarters, more than 100 of our members participated. This quarter’s feedback (provided between mid-December and this morning) showed the most optimism since we began our “Guildmember Predictions” surveying. What follows are two ways of viewing their feedback, as well as all of the additional comments provided by our homebuilders, remodelers, real estate developers, and contractors.

Guildmember Confidence Index (GCI)

The Guildmember Confidence Index boils all of the answers down to a single number. We calculate the GCI by subtracting the percentage of members predicting decline from the percentage predicting improvement. Therefore, a positive number means more members predict things will be getting better than worse. The only quarter in which the GCI has been negative (so far) has been Q4 2008.

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Following are the top 10 posts of 2009, by pageviews (hat tip to Signal vs Noise):

1. May 6: Member Predictions & Strategies

2. September 30: Call for Entries: 2010 Guildmaster Awards

3. January 27: How did you find out about us?

4. April 20: New Release: GuildQuality & Social Media

5. July 16: Prospect Surveying is Now Available

6. April 21: Coastal Living Idea House in I’On

7. July 1: Guildmember Confidence Climbs in 2nd Quarter

8. February 27: Announcing the 2009 Guildmaster Award Winners

9. February 11: Overhaul of GuildQuality Marketing Resources

10. May 4: Guildmembers Most Viewed in the Qlist Year to Date

12/3 Update: The GuildQuality Home Book is now live. Click here to sign up for an account. As a reminder, we’re now field testing an early version of this service. Your feedback will help us work the bugs out and will also inform the way we expand and improve the service.

As we hinted a few weeks ago, we’ll soon privately launch a new service: The GuildQuality Home Book (working title). The GQ Home Book will enable people to easily record all the contractor and project information that relates to their home.

Those that sign up will receive invitations to participate in our private release when we go live with the service.

I’ve received a number of questions about the new service, and what follows is my attempt to answer the biggest ones.

“How much will it cost?”

We’re presently thinking it would be free. We may introduce premium features down the line and the consumer would pay for them, or they might be free to all customers of Guildmembers. We plan to execute it in a way that actively promotes and benefits our members so that the service will be a marketing, selling, and membership retention tool for GuildQuality.

“Who will control the information in the account?”

The consumer would control the information in their house record, and it would be private to them, though they could share it with select people or companies. As with current GQ data, we will probably aggregate the data somehow for the benefit of all users.

“Where did the idea come from?”

For some time, I’ve been thinking about how we can help strengthen the relationship between members and their customers beyond the surveying process. Some time ago, my wife shared with me an article about keeping a “home journal” and that got my wheels turning. I pitched it to a bunch of people thereafter, and they liked it a lot. Then in October, I did a focus group with about a dozen members, and the reception all around was sufficiently positive to prompt us to spend some engineering time on it.

“Why aren’t you launching the Home Book for everyone right now?”

We like to develop things iteratively. That helps us keep projects small with the expectation that we can make improvements as we go along. This also saves us the burden of developing a project for a year, and then launching it only to discover a year’s worth of miscues when we see it operating out in the wild.

The product we have right now is a simple stand-alone service. It includes consumer-facing functionality that lets people record the important stuff that relates to their home. But before we launch publicly, we have a handful of additional things we’d like to add to facilitate the relationship between homeowners and our members.

“How do you intend for it to “facilitate the relationship” between the homeowner and the Guildmember?”

We expect to add at least three things in to the Home Book accounts before we launch publicly.

First is the auto-creation of a Home Book account for people that complete surveys. By automagically creating a survey respondents account, we can auto-populate it with a bunch of relevant project and Guildmember information and save them the hassle of having to enter all that stuff in themselves.

The second is a feed of cool information about the GuildQuality member that is listed in their account. So in addition to tracking things about their home, the user can also see what the member is up to elsewhere. We believe this will help members stay top-of-mind for the homeowner, facilitate additional work in the future, and encourage referrals to friends and family.

Third, we intend to create some interconnectivity between each Home Book and the Guildmembers’ project record inside the existing member accounts. Our members’ will be able to add some things into each Home Book where they are listed as a contractor. Think warranty and service management, special offers and messages for past customers, and a place where both member and customer can record information about ongoing work.

“How does this jive with the GuildQuality mission?”

GuildQuality’s mission is to elevate the stature of the building, remodeling, and real estate profession. We primarily do that with our customer satisfaction surveying by helping our members deliver great service. For the last couple years, we’ve been fueling that effort by celebrating the quality we see in our community — if more people choose great companies to buy from and build with, then fewer people will have bad experiences, and this will strengthen the industry as a whole. The homeowner accounts will provide a platform for the ongoing promotion of the existing relationships formed between members and customers. My thinking is that the customer/contractor relationship shouldn’t end with the sale of the home or the completion of the renovation, and there’s great value for both parties by helping to continue it.

Register for an invitation. Let me know if you’d like to receive an invite to try out the GuildQuality Home Book when we privately launch next week. 12/3 update: We’re now live. Click here to sign up.

Click here to review this year’s qualifications and apply for a 2010 Guildmaster Award. It takes less than 30 seconds to complete the form. So far, more than 100 members have requested to be considered for an award.

Some random factoids for your Thanksgiving Eve:

At the bottom of each page on our website, and at the top of every one of our Guildmember profile pages, visitors will find a little orange plus that encourages them to “Share”. This tiny feature, powered by AddThis, makes it easy for folks to share content from our site by email or via a social network. Visitors share something about GuildQuality (usually about our members) an average of just under three times a day. By what means are they sharing?

Email remains the market leader, with 31% of shares from the past two months. Old school printing is in second place with about 23%. And Facebook is the leader among the social networks, with 18% versus Twitter’s 14%.

If you find this of interest, then you are probably as dorky as I am, and you may also be interested in these stats about which social networks your customers are most likely to click to from member profiles or after they’ve completed a survey.

On November 20, 2000, I incorporated GuildQuality. It was a couple more years before I made the business my full time occupation, and it wasn’t until August of 2003 that GuildQuality’s surveying and reporting system first launched. A lot has changed since that fateful day in 2000. I got a dog, a wife (who came with another dog), a great group of employees, then a son, a daughter, and, along the way, hundreds of fantastic customers. Thanks to all of you for helping me realize what was, nine years ago, barely more than a vague idea. Today, our community of quality includes hundreds of the most quality-minded building, remodeling, and real estate professionals working today. Together they, along with our tremendous employees and supportive partners, are pushing GuildQuality and our mission forward. Together we are elevating the stature of our profession to a level commensurate with its importance.

In October, the good people at Kohler hosted a handful of our custom homebuilders at their company headquarters in Kohler, Wisconsin. Business-wise, the trip included a tour of the historic factory and a series of focus groups. The Kohler team was interested in sharing with our homebuilders how they craft their products, and hearing our members’ thoughts on what Kohler can be doing to help them deliver superior quality and service to their homeowners.

The Kohler factory is an exhibit of craftsmanship from every period of our history. Kohler artisans are hand finishing fixtures almost immediately alongside giant robot arms and glowing vats of molten iron. If you are a builder or remodeler, and you ever you have an opportunity to visit Kohler, Wisconsin, you must go. I have never seen anything like it, and it elevated my appreciation of both American industry and industrial artistry.

But the visit wasn’t all business. We stayed at the historic American Club, dined at River Wildlife, and golfed at Whistling Straits. The food and comfort we experienced during our Kohler experience was surpassed only by the thoughtful hospitality of the Kohler team.