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

Delivering a beautifully built new home, perfecting a kitchen renovation, or rebuilding the entire exterior of a home is no easy task. So it’s always amazing to me when our wonderful builders, remodelers, contractors, and developers actually deliver the kind of service and craftsmanship that leaves customers thrilled with their work. That they do it with such overwhelming frequency borders on the miraculous.

So here’s my challenge to you all: Don’t squander all that hard work and lose that relationship over something as trivial as a little oversight or a lack of communication. Instead, capitalize on that amazing accomplishment, and enjoy the benefits of a great relationship with each of your customers in perpetuity.

The significant majority of our members survey their customers multiple times, with the last survey occurring at or near the expiration of the warranty period. But what are you missing if you end your surveying with the expiration of the warranty? In the years that follow, your customers will…

1) forget about you;

2) have intended to send your information to their friend after that cocktail party, but forgotten about it, and hadn’t received anything from you that might serve as a reminder;

3) have a problem that you could easily fix, but are just going to suffer it because it’s too much effort to let you know about it and it’s such a little thing. Then little Sally has a birthday party and the parent of one of the guests (who is a homebuilder) points it out, and that conversation turns into a bigger conversation about building that second home at the lake, and your customer builds a second home (or a new kitchen, or a deck, or a carport — you get the idea) but they never spoke with you about it.

And all because you didn’t make it easy for them to stay in touch with you. How can we fix this? Simple:

Let’s modify your default survey scenario to add a few more extremely brief Long After Closing surveys. We’ll ask your clients if they’d still recommend you and if there’s anything you can help them with.

If you’d like some help setting this up, please let us know.

One of the most common enhancement requests we receive is for an easy way to print a high-quality version of the GuildQuality Customer Report. Printing a web page is tricky business, and every browser will do it differently, so coming up with a built-in solution to consistently render HTML on the printed page is a deceptively big project, so we’ve instead been focusing our engineering resources on other things.

However, I completely appreciate that a high-quality printed version of the Customer Report is a great addition to your marketing collateral. With that in mind, I wanted to share how I go about producing high-quality images of webpages. Hopefully you’ll find this useful for your Customer Report and other pages as well. Check out this video for a brief explanation, and if you like this method, download the “Screengrab” plugin for Firefox.

One additional thing I neglected to show in the video: If your customer report is very long, you might want to just print the first page. However, if you’d like to have the footer show up on a printed version, you should shorten your report — either by shortening the period of time displayed in the Customer Report, or by removing some customer comments.

Aug 10 Update: See how we’ve juiced this feature up to help with local search results or check out the most recent comments shared by our members via the GQ Twitter Client.

Before today, you needed to go through a few gyrations to automatically tweet the comments you’ve published on your Customer Report (click here to read more about publishing comments). No more! GuildQuality now offers a seamless integration with your Twitter account. If you use Twitter for your business, check out the video below to see how it’s done.

Log in to your account to get started, or read on for more information.

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Dlvr.it is a simple (and free) web service that enables you to “distribute your blog to twitter, facebook and more.” In past posts, I’ve described how you can auto-post your published customer comments or blog posts to Twitter or your Facebook fan page. At the time I wrote those posts, dlvr.it didn’t exist, so I suggested an alternate feed distribution tool. While the service I suggested mostly worked, it wasn’t completely reliable. If you wanted to be sure your home buyers’ comments were being fed to your Facebook fan page or a your blog posts about your recent remodel projects were being auto-tweeted, it wasn’t the perfect tool.

In contrast, after testing it for a month or so, dlvr.it seems to work flawlessly. So this morning, I ported all our feeds over to dlvr.it and we’re now off to the races. You can see where we’re using it at GuildQuality’s Twitter account, our Facebook Fan Page, and an alternate Twitter account I set up that publishes all of the activity in our member stream (limit of 3 posts every 15 minutes).

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On December 3, GuildQuality hosted a webinar to review some of our marketing resources.

This webinar is for builders, remodelers, and developers who’d like to learn how to take advantage of our marketing resources and for those who need a refresher on the subject. We have a number of tools that help our members enhance their online presence and better articulate their quality of service for prospective customers.

In addition to reviewing our complimentary marketing services (like Customer Reports, Member Profiles, Listings, and our integration with a number of social media services), we also discuss prospect surveying.

GuildQuality was pleased to power Remodeling’s first ever Big50 Service Excellence Award. I had the honor of announcing the award winners at Friday’s event.

Remodeling’s Big50 Service Excellence Award was created to recognize exemplary customer service in the remodeling profession. A remodeler’s ability to deliver a consistently exceptional customer experience is worth recognizing and celebrating. Not only does it improve the lives of those customers who experience it directly, but it solidifies the business’ reputation as an accomplished professional – one worth referring and one worthy of repeat business. And for all of those entrepreneurs who make a living improving, expanding, repairing or rebuilding homes, the great work of a wonderful remodeler elevates the stature of our entire profession.

Four remodelers are the recipients of the 2009 Service Excellence Award. To identify the winners, GuildQuality interviewed more than 2,000 customers about their remodeling experience. The competition was unbelievably fierce, with the 50 candidates being among the most accomplished remodelers in North America.

Those four remodelers are:

Tim Lemke Construction, Mendota Heights, MN

Shawn Lober Construction, Danville, CA

Roberts Construction Group, Evanston, IL

Zimmerman Associates, Lakeland, FL

Congratulations to this year’s Big50 Service Excellence Award Winners, as well as the other 46 2009 Big50 Remodelers (including ten of our Guildmembers).

In late October of 2008, GuildQuality introduced “Listings”. With that release, members could post Examples of Work and Homes for Sale — complete with photos and maps — to their Qlist Profile.

So far, around 10% of our membership has created a listing and taken advantage of this functionality.

Some reasons why you should do this right now: 11 of the 20 most prominent Qlist Profiles have Listings, and two of the five most-viewed Qlist Profiles have Listings.

And here’s a more meaningful stat: In the last 30 days, each listing has been viewed an average of 10 times.

And if you put a little effort into your Qlist Profile, and become one of the top 25% most viewed profile pages, that 10/listing average climbs to 15 views each month!

The first listing is free, members can have up to three listings for $10 per month, and up to 10 listings is $20 per month.

Assuming you have three examples of your work listed with a handful of nice pictures, descriptions, etc, you’ll likely get about 30 views (or “clicks”) each month. That’s $0.33 per click. Assuming you put in 10 listings and that average holds, your cost per click drops to $0.10 each. And if you only want to put in one (just to test it out) then your cost per click is ZERO.

So if you haven’t created a Listing, what’s stopping you? Click here to log into your account and be taken directly to the Qlist management page. From there, simply click “Add a New Qlist Listing”, and you’re off to the races. It takes just a couple minutes and is very straightforward.

Ever wonder about the tiny little bar next to your company name on the Qlist? That’s an indicator of your “profile strength” and the higher the profile strength, the closer to the top of the Qlist you appear in our default sort order.

Broadly speaking, two things influence profile strength: Consistent surveying and Profile content. Along with the recent enhancements to our reporting system and marketing features, we tweaked this algorithm to give additional credit for survey consistency.

More details:

Members get lots of credit for surveying on a regular basis. We do this not on volume (as we have both very small and very large members) but on consistency. We also take credit away if you’ve been inactive for long time. So the lesson here: Stay current with your surveying and enjoy a higher rank.

We also give credit for just about every piece of content you publish to your profile: If you have a logo in there, you get points. If you have a listing (examples of work or homes for sale), you get points. If you link to affiliations or social media, you get points. Etc. The lesson here: the more content you provide for consumers, the higher you’ll rank.

One of the juiciest features of the GuildQuality program is the Project Filters feature. Creating customized Project Filters gives you the ability to discern even more valuable information from the standard customer satisfaction feedback. This element enables you to “tag” surveys with specific characteristics, such as the salesperson that did the deal, the project manager in charge of construction, the neighborhood in which the home was built, the company division under which the project falls, etc. When you create these “tags”, you can then look at the hundreds of data points you might have, and narrow the information down by your filters. For example: compare the performance of all salespeople to one another; see which project managers are managing expectations appropriately; identify which company division ranks the highest in customer satisfaction; view only projects in the Design/Build division. View a short video tutorial on how to create Project Filters here.

In the same vein of Project Filters comes Question Bundles. Creating Question Bundles allows you to group together specific questions by type and then view these specific groups on the reporting side of things. For example: questions related to the communication process, problem resolution, and schedule of the job are directly related to the performance of the project manager. Create a “Project Manager” Question Bundle, selecting these specific questions to form the group.

When used together, Project Filters and Question Bundles can deliver a highly-targeted view of performance. For example: view a Project Manager Scorecard, selecting only the Project Manager Bundle, and you have a report card of how well your project managers perform in categories for which they are explicitly responsible. Take a look at the picture below – we can see how each of our project managers perform in comparison to one another, in the specific duties that pertain to their role.

Another way to utilize Question Bundles is to compare Bundles to one another. In the example below, we’ve set up Bundles for the sales side, production side, and office side of our company. We’ve generated a Scorecard report comparing these Bundles to one another in order to see which facets of our company are delivering a great customer experience.

The following post is courtesy of the Remodelers Advantage PowerTips newsletter. RA is hosting two day Sales Workshop (“Building and Managing a Winning Sales Team”) on November 20 and 21 in the Baltimore area. To find out more, click here.

Cooking Up Sales

Here’s a fun and easy way to do some soft-sell marketing: Host a dinner for clients and prospects – and let the clients do the talking (and selling) for you.

For the past 4 years, the folks at Thompson Remodeling, Inc., in Grand Rapids, Mich., have been hosting monthly dinners in their well-equipped kitchen showroom. They hire a husband-and-wife team of chefs whom they’ve known for 15 years and spend a couple hundred dollars to have the chefs prepare a sumptuous dinner for a couple of past clients, a couple of current clients, and a pair of prospects.

“During dinner, we don’t talk about business at all,” says Ben Thompson, general manager of the design/build remodeling firm. “We talk about hobbies, favorite meals and recipes, and everyone’s families. The past and current clients say nice things about us to the prospects. We sit back, keep our mouths shut, and we get sales.”

Lately, Thompson’s financial planner has been hosting dinners at the showroom. “It works pretty much the same way as our company-hosted dinners do,” says the remodeler, “except the planner pays for the meal and it’s his past, current, and prospective clients who join us in the kitchen. I’m there, too, and I put in a good word for him because he’s done great work for me. We sometimes get sales from those dinners, too.”

The client cuisine nights are becoming legendary. Recently, Thompson’s CPA called him up and told him he’d like to host a dinner, too. The remodeler is all for it. “It’s a phenomenal way to connect with people,” he says. “We’re providing a service for businesses we believe in and we get to spend time with people who might be potential clients for our company.”

Looking for other ways to improve your sales team? Building and Managing A Winning Sales Team PowerMeeting has the answers. This 2-day meeting in Baltimore, MD will put you on track to have hard hitting, high performing players on your team.

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.

Investing in growth during challenging times is the philosophy of many successful building and remodeling companies out there. When the market slows down, they speed up. I’ve seen as a characteristic among GuildQuality members the tendency to be a bit ahead of the curve, the willingness to face challenges head on, and as a result, these companies stay afloat when all around them others are folding or slapping stickers onto their trucks promoting some new skill. In talking to building professionals all across the country, one thing we’ve heard consistently from all sizes, types, and locations of our members is a stress on the importance of a strong, smart marketing push during market downturns.

I wanted to pass along a few tips on ways to use your GuildQuality tools to help strengthen your brand and promote your excellence to past, present, and future customers. Combining these things with your other marketing efforts should yield positive effects. Most importantly, these things are FREE– they are just some of the many benefits of being a GuildQuality member.

Customize your Qlisting
Add content to your Qlisting and use as it a reference piece. Include satisfaction scores, testimonials, a company bio, type of work you do, etc. Building your Qlisting helps your web-marketing efforts: linking to relevant content boosts your search results in search engines such as Google and Yahoo (this is called Search Engine Optimization). A stronger web presence brings your name and brand to your customers’ eyes and minds. The GuildQuality Qlist gets tons of traffic – about 800 hits a month. You can see how many people have viewed your company’s Qlisting via your Dashboard.

Incorporate your company logo
Add your logo to your Qlisting and put it on your survey mailers. Reinforce the strength of your brand and your commitment to quality and satisfaction. Both Qlistings and survey mailers look really slick when the logo is added. Check out this previous blog post on the 10 most visited Qlistings, and here’s a picture of our gallery of survey mailers. Both of these are easily uploaded right into your account.

Share your stats
Share your strengths with your clients – let them know what to expect when working with your team. You can do this in a number of different ways, but one easy way is to print your Customer Report and include it in leave-behind material on sales calls. You can also link your Customer Report to your company’s website so that clients and potential clients can see your commitment to the customer experience.

Most importantly, share your results with your entire team. When it’s transparently clear what the company’s strengths and weaknesses are, you can work on improving the weak areas and promoting the strong areas. Holding your team accountable to their performance will result in a better customer experience.

For any additional info on these things, send an email to our Member Services team and we’ll help you out.