GuildQuality

This past year at GuildQuality has been fast paced and full of exciting changes. We introduced new product features, launched new partnerships, welcomed a fresh batch of wonderful employees…oh, and we moved to Midtown!

Whether you’ve been a member of GuildQuality for years, or you’ve just recently joined our community of quality, you will want to take a moment to familiarize yourself with our recently developed components built to make your life easier.

In November, GuildQuality optimized our reporting app for iPhones, Androids and Blackberries! Mobile devices make real-time delivery of our survey feedback even more useful to you. Login, Survey Response, and our Dashboard are easy to view via mobile. We’ve even optimized the actual survey form that your customers use to complete online surveys. Not only does this enable you to view feedback quicker, but it allows your customers to provide information more efficiently.

Speaking of feedback, have you opted in to GuildQuality reviews? GuildQuality reviews provide a wonderful opportunity to empower your customers to share more information about their experience with your company. Most of our Guildmembers leverage the customer feedback they receive through our new reviews feature to strengthen their brand. With the addition of GuildQuality Reviews, more robust, useful, informative commentary is also increasingly finding its way into search results. Prior to launching GuildQuality Reviews, we piloted the feature with a number of our early adopter members. Their most popular request was for us to allow them to add their own responses to reviews they receive, and now you can!

If you’ve been with GuildQuality since before September of this year, you can appreciate our GuildQuality dashboard redesign. Our goal with the new design was to enable you to do and see as much as possible from one location, minimizing your need to dive deeper into the account in order to see trends in performance. For your convenience we’ve added a Scorecard right on the dash, Recent Responses are now vertically oriented, and you are able to directly publish comments.

In addition to new product features, 2011 brought about a partnership with Kohler. GuildQuality is now the preferred provider of customer satisfaction surveying for members of Kohler’s Leading Edge Program.

We welcome a new partner and four more talented folks to the GuildQuality team this year, three sales associates, Andy Cesario, Mike Sveda and Rebekah Taylor, along with our new Marketing Communications Manager, Erica England.

This is just a glimpse of all that we’ve accomplished this year at GuildQuality. We were extremely fortunate to have experienced another successful year working with top building and remodeling professionals who value customer satisfaction as much as we do. Thank you to all of our fantastic members!

P.S. If you haven’t visited our new office, pop over to the big city in 2012 and come see us in the heart of Midtown Atlanta.

This month’s newsletter includes an update about GuildQuality badges, reviews in search results, lots of member and partner news, and job openings at GuildQuality.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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For the last half-dozen years, we’ve used an email marketing software for all of our mass emailing. While the GuildQuality application handles our email surveying and system notifications, an Australian company called CampaignMonitor helps us with all the other stuff.

If we’re sending a notification to all of our members about how to use a new feature, CampaignMonitor powers it. If we’re notifying all of our Dallas prospects that we’ll be in town in a few weeks, CampaignMonitor powers that message. And this morning, CampaignMonitor sent out our latest member newsletter.

Here is the dashboard report for the newsletter’s first hour out in the wild.

(Click on image to enlarge)

Pretty much any email marketing software will do a few of basic things for you:

1) Enable you to send good looking emails to lots of people;

2) Manage your recipient list, allow people to subscribe, allow people to unsubscribe, and keep you from sending emails to folks who’ve unsubscribed; and

3) Track who opens the email, who clicks on links, and on which links people click.

A good email marketing software will do all this with style. CampaignMonitor’s reporting is exceptional. We’re contemplating a big overhaul of GuildQuality’s own customer satisfaction performance reporting for our builders, remodelers, and developers, and CampaignMonitor is one of the web applications we look to for inspiration.

Here are a couple more screen shots to give you an idea of the thought and polish that goes into their reporting, and the value one can get from a great looking report: (more…)

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.

In our Newsletter from February, we announce a real-time feed of published member activity, how you can take advantage of the new feature, other products announcements and more.

Subscribe to our newsletter here.

In our Newsletter from November, you’ll find an article on best practices, a webinar invitation, member news, and an invite to beta test a new GuildQuality service.

Responding to feedback from our members, we’re pleased to announce our new Prospect Surveying service.

Using our Prospect Surveying template, the service will enable you to collect detailed feedback from homeowners who are either evaluating your company or who have decided not to work with you.  The questions cover a range of topics — including the homeowner’s decision-making criteria and your performance in listening to their needs, presenting appropriate solutions, and following-up.  You will be able to identify the areas in which you exceeded and fell short of expectations.

The service will leverage our telephone, email, and mail card surveying process in order to generate a higher response rate than you might achieve with email or mail alone.  The “live” conversations between our surveyors and the homeowner will provide rich, actionable commentary that can help you close more business and better manage your sales team.

Over the last few months, we’ve beta tested the service with our own sales prospects and with a select group of members, including WindowPRO and Case Design/Remodeling.  For these two members, prospects were surveyed after the initial sales appointment and during their evaluation.  The survey is short and sweet, taking no more than 2-3 minutes to complete.  40-50% of those surveyed have been willing to complete the survey, providing information on a large number of prospects.

Here’s what Jake Zahnow, CEO of WindowPRO, has to say about their experience… “this provides another touch point with our prospects to find out exactly where they are in the decision process.” Jake reviews every completed survey, then follows up with his salespeople to close the loop with the homeowner.  He is surveying 100% of the company’s prospects, which he believes sets the stage for another GuildQuality survey once they become customers – “it shows that we listen.”

Homa Nowrouzi of Case Design/Remodeling shares that they survey a sample of prospects every month, and are “sharing the information broadly within the organization to create healthy competition and excellence at every level.”  Homa indicates that the company’s closing ratio on new business has improved, and they have built the results into compensation plans.

There is no additional cost to add this service — you simply pay on a per survey basis.  The data and feedback is kept in a separate GuildQuality account, so this will not affect your scores for customer surveying.

If you are interested, please contact us at support@guildquality.com.  We can have you up and running very quickly.

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This morning, Dennis DuRoff posted my talk from yesterday on how and why GuildQuality uses social media. In it, I describe the various ways the GuildQuality blog, Twitter and LinkedIn help us to service our members and grow our business. I also talk about social media’s direct relevance to customer satisfaction in building and remodeling. how builders and remodelers are using Facebook, and how consumer rating sites like Kudzu and Google Local fit in to the picture as well. I close with a brief description of what GuildQuality does to help boost our members’ presence on the web and participation in the online dialog. The talk lasts an hour.

UPDATE: Following are the answers to questions asked by attendees, that we didn’t have time to answer during the webinar:

“How much time do you spend on all this social media stuff?” I am our company’s primary marketer, and it is safe to say that I’m also the face of the company. Including the time I spend writing our blog (which provides 95% of the content for our newsletters), I probably spend fourty five minutes a day on social media for GuildQuality. Most of that is our blog, a good bit is with Twitter, and the remainder is with LinkedIn.

“How do you link Flickr to Facebook, LinkedIn or Twitter?” Facebook and Plaxo have some built in widgets that enable you to auto-feed your Flickr photos to your personal account. I don’t believe Facebook can do that yet for Company Pages or Groups. LinkedIn does not offer a way to connect to your Flickr account. You can set up your Twitter account to automatically post a tweet of Flickr uploads (or blog posts, or anything that can have an RSS feed) with Twitterfeed. Detailed instructions are here. Twitterfeed isn’t the only game in town, but it is what we use, and it’s worked fine for us. It is also worth noting that Flickr’s terms of use explicitly prohibit commercial uses, so if you intend to try and sell stuff with Flickr, make sure you read this.

Regarding Facebook Groups versus Pages (for your business presence on Facebook), one of the audience members added the following comment, essentially restating more emphatically my counsel to use Pages: “The skinny from those at Facebook is that much more energy (from the company) is going into Pages and Groups are fading to the background.”

“What are your recommendations for Security Settings for Professional and Personal Facebook and Linkedin Sites? How much should you reveal on public areas Etc?” On my profile pages, I avoid publishing anything that I don’t want anyone to see, and so I go ahead and make everything public. If you are interested in publishing things that you don’t want others to see, I encourage you to really think about whether or not you ought to publish it. GuildQuality does have a private discussion group on LinkedIn that is limited to our members, employees, and others that are “close” to us. Keeping it private keeps it from being dominated by people trying to sell their stuff (sales pitches seem to dominate the public groups on LinkedIn). Flickr and YouTube offer privacy settings that enable you to share some personal things (pictures and videos) only with authorized users. I stick to my “don’t post it if you don’t want someone to see it” strategy with those sites as well, though I ocassionally “privatize” pictures/videos in which my children or wife are looking just too darn cute for public consumption.

“What are costs of these sites?” Most of the social media sites I described, including Yelp, are free. Kudzu (another consumer rating site) offers some premium services for a monthly fee. Flickr charges $20 per year for a premium account (which you will definitely need if you want to use it regularly). You can have a GuildQuality account for as little as $30 per month, and the more folks you survey, the more you pay. Included with basic membership is a free Customer Report (if you choose to publish summaries of your feedback) and Listings and Examples of Work, both of which are visible on your public Guildmember profile page.

“What are good apps to use on the iPhone for all of these links?” I probably do 90% of my Twittering when I’m standing in line, in the dentist’s waiting room, etc. The iPhone’s web browsing capabilities make it easy to get your geek on wherever you are. Yelp has a nice iPhone enabled website. I use the Tweetie application for Twitter. Facebook and LinkedIn both have their own decent iPhone applications.

“How does one setup a company page on LinkedIn or Facebook?” First, you’ve got to have a personal account with Facebook or LinkedIn. Assuming you do, and assuming you are logged in, click here for Facebook and here for LinkedIn.

The GuildQuality lab has been busy over the past couple months. Here’s a quick summary of what they’ve been working on.

New Features: Scorecard, Multiple Users, and Enhanced Peer Settings
Last week, we finished building several big service enhancements. They include the GuildQuality Scorecard (to give you an executive-level summary of company performance), Multiple Users per Account (so everyone in your company can have their own GQ account), and Enhanced Peer Group Settings (that include price point and more specific product type descriptions). We’ll go live with these enhancements on Sunday. To see more details, check out the brief descriptions in our new GQ Blog.

Live Demonstrations of New Functionality
We have three webcasts scheduled for next week, during which Rob Faraj and Geoff Graham will give a tour of the brand new stuff. Please let us know in advance if you’d like to attend, and we’ll send you an invitation.

Tuesday, November 14 at 10:00 AM EST
Wednesday, November 15 at Noon EST
Thursday, November 16 at 2:00 PM EST
ADDED: Monday, November 20 at 10:00 AM EST
ADDED: Tuesday, November 21 at Noon EST

The New GuildQuality Website and Blog
We also launched the new and improved GuildQuality website. With the new website comes the GuildQuality Blog – an ever expanding resource of feature descriptions, member news, and relevant articles on the building industry or customer satisfaction. If you come across anything you think our members would find relevant, including big news about your company, please send it to me, as I update the blog regularly.

Thanks very much for being a part of our community of quality-minded building professionals. We’re excited to be helping you in your ongoing pursuit of excellence.