The latest news from GuildQuality.

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…)

Later this month, GuildQuality will launch the next iteration of the Qlist. The new Qlist will provide our members with a more direct opportunity to leverage their membership in GQ for marketing purposes. Members may choose whether or not to be included in the Qlisting, and they may customize the content they display. If a member chooses to be included, they can show off great customer comments, promote their relationship with industry organizations like the NAHB or NARI, and describe their company and the type of work they do.

In September, we quietly introduced the Qlist in the hinter-sections of the old website. When we re-launched the new site in November, we gave it more prominence as part of a newly dedicated homeowner/homebuyer section. With the introduction of member-opt-in and configurable content, the new Qlist is realizing our plans of introducing a wider consumer audience to our membership.

We’ll announce the official launch of the Qlist in the next week or two.