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

Your member profile allows you to publish pictures and descriptions of your work, communities, and homes for sale. We call these “listings”. Previously, we’ve allowed every member to publish one listing for free, and we’ve charged extra for more than 1.

Today, we raised the “free” limit to 10 listings.

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.

You’ll notice that our members with listings generally appear higher in the default sort order of the member directory. Amount of content is one of the things that determines the ranking of member profiles. The other two are recency of surveying and whether or not the member uses the GuildQuality badge.

GuildQuality’s member directory — the Qlist — includes lots of information about most of our builders, remodelers, real estate developers, and contractors. And as such, it enjoys a tremendous amount of consumer traffic.

We’ve invested a lot of energy in designing and improving the Qlist, always with a focus on making it as helpful as possible for consumers who are looking to learn more about the members of our community of quality.

A couple months ago, we tweaked the default sort order, so that it no longer sorted companies solely by the content of their profile, but also by the consistency of their survey feedback. The more consistently someone has been surveying over the past year, the more likely they are to appear near the top of the list.

Last night we introduced a third component: “interestingness” (I believe the concept was first widely used by Flickr for photo sharing). Now, in addition to the amount of content and the consistency of surveying, members in the Qlist are also ranked by how interesting visitors have found their profile page to be.

To measure “interestingness”, we divide the number of visitors to the profile by the number of total “clicks” during the visit. The more likely someone is to click (on the members’ company website link, their Listings, their Customer Report, their Twitter page, etc), the more “interesting” we deem that listing, and the more Qlist juice we give it.

Each of the three categories (Amount of Content, Consistency of Surveying, and Interestingness) constitute roughly a third of the strength we give each profile in the default rankings. For each member, the first two won’t change very much, and the last one (Interestingness) will change daily: Clicks made on Tuesday impact Wednesday’s sort order.

With this addition, consumer behavior will begin impacting profile sort rankings. The more engaging people find your content, the higher you’ll rank. Our idea is that this will reward members who include lots of compelling content, and it will make our Qlist an even stronger resource for consumers looking to learn more about some great companies.

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. You can also pay a little more to increase the number of Listings and Examples of Work you post in 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 Twitterrific application for Twitter, and I understand a lot of people really like Tweetie. Facebook and LinkedIn both have their own decent iPhone applications.

“How does one setup a company page on linked in 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.

As of tomorrow morning, your Scorecard will offer you a new way to monitor trends in your performance.

Previously, you could track what percentage of your customers were happy or very happy, and you could separately track what percentage were unhappy. Now, you can use an index (working title: “GuildQuality Index” or “GQI”) to present a representation that also gives weight to the percentage of folks who are unhappy.

The GQI presents the percentage of your answers that are “4″ minus the percentage that are “0,” “1,” or “2.”

From a trend reporting perspective, using the GQI rather than a “Percentage of answers that were 4 (Strongly Agree)” accentuates your changes over time, just as using a “Percentage of answers that were 4″ accentuates your changes in performance relative to using a “Percentage of answers that were 3 or 4.”

It is also useful to segment your customers based on those who are your biggest fans versus those who aren’t as enthusiastic. Of note, simultaneous with this improvement, we are introducing a social media feature that helps our members to deepen their connection with their biggest advocates via social networks and consumer rating sites.

This enhancement comes on the heels of expanded exporting features and better sort functionality in the Scorecard.

Late this evening, we’ll go live with some enhancements that help our members leverage new media to stay better connected with past customers and become more accessible and compelling to prospects.

When I talk about social media, I am referring to two broad categories of web-applications that are built entirely on user generated content: Social Networks and Consumer Rating Sites.

Social networks like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn are helping builders, contractors, and remodelers to connect with their customers. John Wieland is tweeting and blogging about his Get Housing Moving tour. Henderer Design + Build is collecting fans on Facebook. And here at GuildQuality, I’m soliciting product feedback from more than 100 of our users via a LinkedIn discussion group.

Consumer rating sites like Kudzu and Yelp are helping consumers find reputable businesses, and they’re also providing search engines with highly relevant content. Google and Yahoo give special consideration to consumer reviews — lots of reviews (good or bad) can drive you closer to the top of search results. So if your public ratings are largely favorable, that is likely to give a consumer the extra confidence they need to reach out to you.

Connecting you with your promoters: With tonight’s new release, we have overhauled the page that displays after someone completes a survey (or returns to our website to review a survey they completed in the past).

Beginning tomorrow, if your survey respondent gave you high marks, we can serve up the social media sites of your choice. On the social network side of things, we’ll enable them to follow you on Twitter, connect on LinkedIn, or become a fan on Facebook. it can connect your survey respondents with the social media sites of your choice. You can also include links to your profile page on several consumer ratings sites, thereby encouraging your happiest customers to spread the word about their positive experience with you company.

And as with our other marketing resources, you’ll be able to track how much social media traffic we have created for you in the marketing section of our application.

If your customer did not give you high marks, they’ll see a simple “thank you for responding” message. Also, we previously used the post-survey-submit page to solicit feedback from folks about their experience with our surveying process. And we got a TON of great commentary. We’re still doing that, but rather than the rating request being the primary focus of the post-survey-submit page, it is a secondary request at the bottom of the page.

I am excited about this new release, as I think it opens a lot of doors for our members, your customers, and GuildQuality to further connect people with information relevant to the betterment of our profession. To manage which content is displayed to your customers, visit the new Social Media section of your account (this link will start working on April 21).

In the Customer Satisfaction Reporting sections of your account, you may notice a few subtle upgrades.

First, we now show the survey response rate for the data set represented on the page (this is on all pages);

Second, on the Scorecard, you can now sort the data by number of survey responses;

Third,on the Scorecard, when you are viewing lots of question answers represented together, we’re also showing you how many surveys all of those answers came from. As an example, in the 2009 Q1 bar above, you now know that those 2,645 answers came from 155 customers.

Two more upgrades that aren’t represented in the image above:

We modified the survey itself so that “Clear my response” is now “Not Applicable”. This makes it more obvious to respondents that they can skip questions.

We enhanced the Projects & Surveying filters so you can now pull a report of all projects or customers who don’t have some filters listed. This makes it easy to update project information for the random projects that didn’t go into the system with all the right fields (project manager, salesperson, division, etc).

Last night, David pushed another enhancement to the GQ reporting system. You won’t notice most of the work, but there are a few things relating to exporting data that are worth pointing out.

You can now export information from the Projects & Surveying section. Want to get a list of all your customers who haven’t responded to surveys? Here’s where you go. Want to get a list of all of your customers that have wrong numbers or bad email addresses? Look no further than this fancy button. Want to get a list of all customers from a particular neighborhood who worked with a particular salesperson? Voila!

We also tightened up survey response exporting feature. You’ve been able to export all your survey feedback for several years, but for some reason, those exports only included customer name and address. They now include phone numbers and email addresses. Want to get a contact list of your happiest customers (or least happy)? Now your export includes all the info you need to create a mail merge or an email list.

Lastly, and by popular demand, we removed the pre-formatting of exports. Our “power” users (me included) regularly export this data for their own analysis. Before diving into their serious number crunching, they had to delete the GQ logo, remove the freeze panes, eliminate the colors, and simplify the text formatting. Now your exports are pristine — column headers are in row 1, and the moment you open the file, you are ready to start crunching.

A couple final thoughts about why we believe exports are really important:

1) We can’t predict every analytical need for every member. Even if we could, designing a reporting application that did everything for everyone would invariably result in a reporting application that did very little well, and lots of things poorly. Data exports empower you to do what you need to do with your data.

2) We don’t want to trap you. I have been trapped by software before. I have been forced to stay with systems for no other reason than they held my data hostage and made it impossible for me to switch without enduring great pain and great cost. The end result for the service provider was, instead of just losing a moderately satisfied paying customer, they kept a paying customer who actively encouraged others NOT to buy their service. The end result for me was pain and sadness. I don’t want you to experience that feeling, and that’s why we let you export your data. This is part of our larger objective to earn your business every month.

Late last week, we went live with some significant expansions to the Qlist — our directory of quality-minded building and real estate professionals. As part of our mission to elevate the stature of our profession to a level commensurate with its importance, we take great pleasure in celebrating and promoting our community of quality.

The Qlist is one of the ways we do that celebrating and promoting. Since we launched it in late 2006, it has quickly become the most frequently visited part of our website, and the significant majority of that traffic comes from consumers interested in finding the right builder, remodeler, or contractor.

Here’s a quick run-down of the recent enhancements:

First, we refined the member profiles themselves — both to make make them more attractive, and to accommodate the inclusion of project listings (see below). Here’s a snapshot of a Profile with lots of content (click here to see a sample profile).

Second, we introduced Listings. Listings enable members to show off their homes for sale and/or examples of their work. Every member gets one Listing at no charge, and there are additional nominal fees for including multiple Listings. You can read all the details in the Qlist section of your account “Preferences”. Here’s is an example of a Home for Sale (click here to see a sample listing).

And the last major change: welcome Canada! We’ve been providing customer satisfaction surveying for a number of Canadian companies for some time. Now our map reflects it. As of this writing, just one Canadian member has “opted-in” so far, and I hope more will do so once they read this news.

People have asked, “What influences the default sort order of members in the Qlist?” We wanted the Qlist to “reward” members with more prominent placement as they include more information in their profiles. So the more content you provide (i.e. Logos, Affiliations, Company Description, Customer Comments, etc) the more likely you are to show up near the top of the list. We expect that Listings and the photos in each listing will be especially interesting to the thousands of consumers that visit the Qlist, so their inclusion in your profile gets you an extra bump up as well.

Creating Listings within your Profile is easy. But if you have any questions at all, don’t hesitate to contact us.

In about a week, we’ll introduce a significant upgrade to our Qlist — our directory of members and their profiles.

Our mission is to elevate the stature of the building and real estate profession to a level commensurate with its importance, and our Qlist plays a nice role in our efforts. Through our service, we help companies enhance the quality of their service, and the Qlist helps us to promote their membership in our community of quality.

Thousands of consumers visit the Qlist on a regular basis to learn more about companies they are considering. Whether they are buying a home or choosing a contractor for a remodeling project, a roof replacement, or a custom built home, the Qlist offers consumers another perspective on our members.

As an example, here is the most visited member profile of the last 30 days, and here are some tips for how to take advantage of the Qlist to celebrate your own business’ commitment to quality.

Next week, we’re introducing Listings into each of our members’ profiles. So very soon, we’ll not only be promoting their companies, but also their work. Members will be able to post homes for sale as well as examples of their work, complete with descriptions, maps, and plenty of photos.

And one more addition: By popular demand, the Qlist will also include profiles for our Canadian members.

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.

In the last 90 days, about 10,000 people have visited the GuildQuality Qlist to find out more about the members in our community of quality. The most frequently visited Qlistings from the last 90 days are:

1. Betenbough Homes, Lubbock, TX
2. Eberle Remodeling, Sacramento, CA
3. Quadrant Homes, Bellevue, WA
4. Johnson Homes, Cherryville, NC
5. Jimmy Nash Homes, Lexington, KY
6. Ivey Residential, Evans, GA
7. Goodall Homes, Gallatin, TN
8. Advanced Kitchens, Marietta, GA
9. Wetherington Builders, North Augusta, SC
10. Structures Building Company, Mount Pleasant, SC

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Common themes: Logos, links, customer comments, company descriptions. Customers want to see as much as they possibly can and the more info in your Qlisting, the more traffic it receives.

Additional content helps in a couple ways: First, the Qlistings with the most content are listed highest in the qlist, and thereby get more traffic. Second, search engines like good content, so the more relevant content on your page, the easier it is for search engines to direct people your way.

You can add more information to you Qlisting in your account preferences. If you need help, let us know!

We also report your Qlisting traffic to you. You may have noticed the messages in your feed: “3 people visited your Qlisting yesterday” (see the arrows below).

And for reference, here’s an example of a great looking Qlisting from Sabal Homes that didn’t quite make our Top 10 Most Visited, but was among the top 20.

You may have noticed some changes on our website. Two weeks ago, we went live with our latest redesign; an attempt to consolidate our messaging, simplify our navigation and yes… add a little bit of sparkle.

In the previous redesign (left top), we went for a simpler look; one that made access to relevent information easy.

In this redesign, we aimed at further simplifying the navigation and the messaging. We decided to consolidate all of our messaging and remove the “I am a…” aspect of the navigation. This dramatically simplified things. We also wanted to give our website a little more “umph”; that is to say, “umph” without sacrificing simplicity. Whenever we embark upon new functionality in our Customer Satisfaction applications, we expend a generous amount of time talking about how our users spend their time with us. In this case, it was no different. We added a little sparkle, but concentrated primarily on simplicity.

Some notable changes were also made to our Qlist and Guildmaster pages. We were after better “balance” on those pages. We moved a few things around, but nothing terribly dramatic as far as layout is concerned.

All in all, we are pleased with the improvements and hope that you all enjoy the changes.

You may have noticed some changes on our website. Getting the most attention this go-round was the Qlist. It was late last fall when we first introduced you to the Qlist. The initial release focused, primarily, on getting our members started on the creation of their Qlistings. As we watched member participation grow, discussions of interface redesign began to surface around the office with increased frequency.

Over the last few months, we’ve put a lot of thought and effort into this redesign. To dramatically improve our users’ experience, there were two very low hanging fruits for us to grab; the first being site navigation and the second; how to visually represent data richness. We realized that, in order for us to be successful, these two goals needed to be interdependent. We wanted to be able to reward our users! Once we decided on maps as the way to go for navigation, it became pretty obvious that color gradients (for states and regions) and sized data points (for regions) would be used to represent data richness.

Also related, but aside (from a design perspective), we needed to indicate, on the Qlists themselves, which Qlistings were more interesting to look at than others, so, we also added a column headed ‘Qlisting’. This field also contained sized data points (middle dots) which scaled in size based upon a little algorithm which determined the richness of the company’s Qlisting (Hint to Guildmembers: publish as much material as you can).

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We launched the GuildQuality Qlist just before Christmas. Since then about 2,000 visitors have viewed nearly 4,000 pages in our directory of building professionals. To give you an idea of what people are viewing, following is a list of the 10 most-frequently visited Guildmember Qlistings of the first 30 days.

Dozens of our members have updated their Qlistings (to include their company profiles, customer comments, logos, affiliations, etc), and several hundred have yet to expand theirs beyond just a company name and contact information. The Qlist accounts for about 20% of GQ’s web traffic, so visit the Qlist launch announcement to find out how to expand your Qlisting.

1. Structures Building Company, Mount Pleasant, South Carolina
2. Paragon Homes Corporation, Brandon, Florida
3. Highland Commercial Roofing, Baldwin Park, California
4. Terry Bennett Builders & Remodelers, Westlake, Ohio
5. Menold Construction, Inc., Morton, Illinois
6. Icon Development Corporation, Atlanta, Georgia
7. Mueller Homes, Sykesville, Maryland
8. Quadrant Homes, Bellevue, Washington
9. Sabal Homes, Mount Pleasant, South Carolina
10. Black & David Properties, Marietta, Georgia

Update: View the 10 most popular Qlistings for the first 30 days
We’ve been spending a good deal of time thinking about how to enable our members to promote themselves to the general public. The result is the GuildQuality Qlist and member Qlistings.

The Qlist
In late fall, we quietly introduced the Qlist: a market-by-market list of members who chose to display some very top-level performance information about their companies. The Qlist also includes the same kind of summary information for thousands of non-member builders and remodelers, whose customers we surveyed as part of our ongoing benchmarking surveying.

Qlistings for Members
Until this weekend, the Qlist was not much more than a list of builders and remodelers. With the introduction of Qlistings for our members, members can configure their own listing page to include as little or as much information about their company as they are comfortable putting on display. They can also opt-in or opt-out of inclusion in the list (the default setting is “opted-in”).

In their Qlisting, members can display their recommendation rate, their company logo and contact information, a description of their company, selected comments or testimonials from their customer surveying, and a list of their company affiliations (i.e. NAHB, NARI, Remodelers Advantage, etc).

How to update your Qlisting… (more…)