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

On October 1, we’ll make a significant change to GuildQuality’s “Recommend” question: We’ll change the answer option from “Yes” or “No” to “Zero to Four”.

Please read on to learn about our reasons for making the change and to get some answers to what I believe will be the most common questions.

If you have additional questions about this, feel free to post them in the comments, or contact us directly.
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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.

My thanks go out to all the builders, remodelers, real estate developers, and contractors who participated in our most recent survey. More than 100 of our members offered their predictions about which way things would go for their businesses and the market in general.

Click on the menu button below to view the full screen version. Also, you can find all past member predictions reports here.

Last week, GuildQuality hosted a webinar for our custom home builders, inviting them to learn more about Southern Living’s Custom Builder Program. For those that couldn’t attend, here’s the recorded version.

Southern Living Webinar to GQ Members from GuildQuality on Vimeo.

On Wednesday, June 16, at 1:30PM EST, Brent Warren, of the Southern Living Custom Builder Program, will host a 45 minute webinar to share information and answer questions about Southern Living’s preferred builder program.

Please join Brent and me on the 16th to learn more about this great organization. Click here to register for the webinar.

About the program:

The Southern Living Custom Builder Program is a network of some of the finest custom homebuilders in the South. Southern Living magazine carefully selects custom home builders that transcend the pages of the magazine into a dream home. Members are chosen for their extensive experience and knowledge, reputation in the marketplace, customer service, excellence in architecture, and home building that tells a Southern story. Only the finest custom homebuilders are invited to be a part of this one-of-a-kind program.

Learn more here.

I’m involved in the development of a traditionally planned community called I’On, near Charleston, SC. Way back in 1997, Julie Cofer of Civic Communications helped us produce I’On’s first marketing piece: A neighborhood newsletter entitled Civitas. Last week, my brother and I were reflecting on our early marketing strategy for the community’s development, and he dug up the inaugural edition. We didn’t know what crowd-sourcing was back then, but that’s essentially what Civitas was.

Civitas was probably our most effective piece of marketing collateral. In addition to helping us market and sell the neighborhood (the most current edition of the journal was our sole brochure for two years), Civitas conveyed the spirit of the place we intended to build and helped us to attract the right sort of people. If you loved the kids’ poems and the silly classifieds, if you enjoyed reading about street design or the symbolism of the I’On seal, if you got excited about a peak behind the curtain at how and why we were building the neighborhood, then chances are, you’d enjoy living there.

More people than ever are visiting GuildQuality.com. This week we saw a few records here at GQHQ:

1) Most visitors to our website in a single day (traffic on Wednesday surpassed the old record set on November 5, 2008);

2) Most visitors to our website in a single week (traffic this week surpassed the old record set three weeks ago); and

3) Most visitors to our website in a single month (traffic in May surpassed the old record set in March).

While much of this traffic comes from within our industry (home builders, remodelers, real estate developers, and contractors), the majority comes from people seeking to build, buy, renovate, improve or rent a home. In May, more than 65% of the pages viewed on our site were pages celebrating the work that our members do: member profiles, customer reports, Guildmaster interviews, or project profiles.

This is great news for GuildQuality and for our wonderful members.

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!

A few weeks ago, we quietly introduced a Partnerships page on our website. Our partnerships allow us to promote the members that work with (or are a part of, subscribe to, have won an award from, etc) a company, association, or organization with which GuildQuality has a strong relationship.

Our relationships with these partners take a few different shapes: In exchange for promoting us to their builders and/or remodelers, we do at least one of the following:

• - Provide the Partner with summary performance information for each member;
• - Provide the Member with some preferred services (like customized peer group performance reporting);
• - Promote the Partner to GuildQuality’s membership.

We don’t always know if our members are affiliated with one of our partners, so if you aren’t on one of these maps, and you think you should be, let us know. We’ll add that partner to your profile page and you’ll appear on that partner’s map.

If you know of an organization that would be a great partner for GuildQuality, please ask that they contact me directly via geoff at guildquality dot com.

P.S. At present, you can navigate to the partnership page via our website’s footer. I expect we’ll give it a more prominent position, but it will continue to sit down there until we can figure out a graceful and relevant location for it on our homepage.

Last week, I had the pleasure of visiting Las Catalinas, a new beach town in the Guanacaste region of Costa Rica (check out their website and follow them on twitter).

Judging from the few days I spent in and around Las Catalinas, I’d venture to guess that Costa Ricans do a lot of important things very differently than North Americans. I thought you’d find some inspiration (or at least interest) in a couple of the differences. (more…)

In the fall, we sold our house in Virginia Highland in Atlanta, and moved about a mile away. As much as I love our new neighborhood, I miss our old neighbors. So I don’t mind in the least when the post office fails to forward mail to our new home — I get an excuse to visit the old street.

This time around, I was pleasantly surprised to see a Calhoun Properties sign in the yard. It looks like our old home’s new owners were wise enough to choose a Guildmember to help them with their remodeling project — and not just any Guildmember, but the very first Atlanta-based company to join GuildQuality, way back in 2004.

There are a bunch of small-world connections with this house: The new owners both graduated from my tiny alma mater; They were classmates of Erin Rosintoski (who recently left GuildQuality after five years to pursue a graduate degree at Georgia Tech); They were married on the same day (different year) and in the same city as my wife and I; Her father lives in a house remodeled by one of our very first GuildQuality members, Phillip Smith General Contractor; and Phil was the person who recommended Lawson Calhoun to the new owners (both Phil and Lawson are in the same 20 Club).

Lawson pulled up while I was chatting with my neighbors, and he and I had a chance to catch up. The new owners of my old house are lucky (and smart!) to have chosen such an excellent person for their remodeling project.

Beginning tomorrow morning, you’ll be able to view performance reports based on Closing Date and Survey Response Date, rather than just Ripe Date. You’ll also be able to view Month-to-Month trends in customer satisfaction, rather than just Quarter-to-Quarter or Year-to-Year. If these are enhancements you’ve previously requested, thanks first for suggesting them, and thanks second for your patience.

At the risk of being overly technical, here’s a brief description of how dates impact our trend reporting. Historically, all of our trend reporting has been driven by a survey’s “ripe date”. Because we survey at contract, mid-way through, after closing, and long after closing, each customer often has a bunch of different milestone dates. If, for example, a member’s survey is supposed to launch 30 days after closing, and closing was to occur on March 1, then the ripe date — the date that the survey is supposed to launch — is March 31. If the member provides us the customer information after the ripe date has already passed, the survey goes out immediately. Because people often got us their customer information after the ripe date had passed, we chose to have our trend reporting be driven off of the ripe date rather than the actual date the survey launched. If you’ve gotten this far, either you understand what we mean when we say “ripe date” or your head hurts. Fortunately, Closing Date and Survey Response Date are pretty self explanatory.

Yesterday, we published our Guildmembers near-term market predictions and strategies. You can view that summary in this blog post.

Today, we finished compiling the feedback we received from non-members. The sample size isn’t as large (while we consistently hear from more than 100 members in this quarterly survey, we generally have only about 50 to 80 non-members participate), but we hear great feedback that’s definitely worth sharing.

As in the Member Predictions Survey, we ask non-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?”

In this quarter, and in previous quarters, non-members and Guildmembers provided a similar forecast for the market as a whole. But when asked about their own business’ prospects for the next six months, non-members are a good bit more cautious (click here to see members’ forecast). With that said, the trend is definitely toward greater optimism among both members and non-members, and, as with our Guildmembers, non-members are more optimistic for their own businesses than for the market in general.

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3/24 Update: You may also be interested in this quarter’s summary of non-member feedback.

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-March and yesterday) 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 many 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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A member asked this morning if it is possible to add their GuildQuality badge to their Facebook Fan Page. Using the “Static FBML” application, I was able to add ours to the GuildQuality Fan Page without any trouble.

The Static FBML application enables you to “add advanced functionality to your Page using the Facebook Static FBML application. This application will add a box to your Page in which you can render HTML or FBML (Facebook Markup Language) for enhanced Page customization.”

I have been able to get it to display in its own tab or within “Boxes,” but I haven’t been able to figure out how to get it to display on our “Wall” or sidebar. If anyone finds a better solution, please let me know.