Posts Tagged ‘newsletter’

3 Ways to Win the Battle Against Survey Fatigue

Surveys have a bad rap. Companies have caught on to the fact that feedback from their customers is an asset to their success, so they’ve begun surveying in a big way, and in every communication channel possible. You don’t want to overwhelm your customer with another survey, but alas, you need to know how they’re feeling.

Fortunately, homebuilders, remodelers, and home services contractors have a unique advantage when it comes to surveying customers. Because homeowners have invested a considerable amount of money toward their new home or home improvement project, and the project directly impacts their quality of life, they are more emotionally invested and motivated to share feedback. Even though homeowners may view your survey as a priority over others, remember they’re still combatting survey fatigue that you need to overcome.

Position Surveying as a Value Proposition
Our members with the highest survey response rates are masters at setting the stage with customers about their surveying process. They place one-pagers about our multi-touch surveying in new customer kits, they introduce and explain the survey process during initial customer meetings, and they advertise surveying customers on their website. While expressing that customer surveying is a part of each project, these members are also emphasizing how valuable they think their customer’s opinions are.

Does your company review every survey response together as a team? Do you take immediate action when you receive negative feedback? How has customer feedback changed your company’s processes? Share that information with your customers. Not only will it make them feel like your company holds their experiences in the highest regard, it’ll show your company really does care about improving.

How Would Your Customers Like to Be Contacted?
In addition to sharing how much of an asset customer feedback is to your company, sometimes avoiding survey indifference can be as easy as finding out how your customer prefers to be contacted. For homebuilders, remodelers, and home services contractors within our community of quality, 61% of surveys were completed via phone this past month. Email surveys reigned second, followed by mail cards.

Ask Engaging Questions
Your survey itself is the most important tool you have to combat survey fatigue. Ask concise but engaging questions regarding your customer’s experience. Take a look at some of my favorite questions from our most-widely used survey:

• How can [Company Name] make your life better?
• [Company Name] is always seeking ways to improve; do you have one suggestion for something we can change?
• What concerns, if any, did you have about the building process prior to starting this project, and how did we address these concerns?
• In what area(s) do you think [Company Name] fell short of your expectations?

While engaging questions are clutch, be sure to keep the total number of questions on your survey low and avoid asking questions that are redundant in nature.

For more tips on surveying customers, measuring customer satisfaction, and promoting your company’s commitment to excellence, request a free copy of our guidebook on Nurturing and Leveraging Customer Relationships.

New Whitepaper: Using Your Reputation to Gain a Competitive Advantage

In a crowded, competitive market, your best growth strategy is learning how to stand-out from the average contractor.  Our new whitepaper, Using Your Reputation to Gain a Competitive Advantage, provides proven strategies used by some of the best companies in the industry and how these owners have dramatically increased their company’s recommendation rate and ultimately grown their business. Register to receive your free copy so you can:

 

  • Understand the best way to measure your reputation
  • Discover how to have a higher than average recommendation rating
  • Learn specific tactics to apply in your business

5 Tips for Social Media Savvy Homebuilders and Remodelers [Guest Post]

I’m excited to introdumRelevance - Carol Morgance Carol Morgan as today’s GuildQuality guest blogger. Carol is the managing partner of mRELEVANCE, LLC and the visionary behind the nationally-ranked, award-winning Atlanta Real Estate Forum. She has established herself as the go-to-expert for public relations, social media and marketing across a variety of industries. I’ve asked Carol to pen a post sharing social media best practices for homebuilders, remodelers, and home services contractors. If you like Carol’s post look out for the latest edition of her book, Social Media 3.0,  coming out in June.

When it comes to social media, many people love spending time on Facebook or Pinterest personally, but when it comes time to promote our business using social media, we drag our heels. The main reason behind this? Well, there are several reasons that I usually hear from builders and remodelers . . . I don’t know where to start, I don’t understand it and it all changes so fast.

With that in mind, here are a few tips for how to start a social media marketing program:

  • Start a company blog. The first step for any good social media program is to start a blog. A blog acts as the center of your content wheel, with each social media site as a spoke for distribution. If you have a good content that is published consistently, you’ll always have something to talk about everywhere else. Your blog should be a self-hosted Word Press blog so that you get maximum SEO value.
  • Evaluate. Before diving right in to any social media site consider whether or not you have the time and resources to dedicate to it. While setting up a Facebook and Twitter should be at the top of your list, make sure you can properly handle those before branching out to sites such as Pinterest, Google+, Houzz or YouTube.
  • Utilize space. When it comes to Facebook, Twitter and Google+, utilizing every inch of space these sites gives you in the form of header or cover photos. These large graphic displays are the first thing a potential buyer sees when they visit your profile, so make sure you are making a positive impression with eye-catching graphics and consistent branding.
  • Pay to play. To be effective reaching friends, fans and followers on many sites, you’ll need to be prepared to pay-to-play. While you may think, why pay when I can use the site for free? You get what you pay for. Facebook sponsored stories, promoted posts and ads have all proven as effective means for increasing your social media presence.
  • Cross promote. One of the biggest advantages of a social media program is cross promotion. Don’t just share your post on Facebook; tweet it, pin it, share it on LinkedIn and Google+ or even make a YouTube video to accompany it. The more unique ways you can share your content, the better. Update your website banner header and consider sending an eblast.

These are just a few words of wisdom when it comes to creating a social media program that will WOW your buyers. For more social media tips, or to learn more about our social media programs, visit the Marketing RELEVANCE website.

GuildQuality Success Story: Georgia Classic Pools Gets Along With Customers Swimmingly

Georgia Classic Pools

Atlanta pool contractor, Georgia Classic Pools knows first-hand the impact customer service has on the success of a business. They dedicate time and resources to develop strong relationships with each client.

“Over 60% of our business comes directly from referrals. How well we work on one pool, determines if we’ll get another pool project on the same street. With that in mind, we try very hard to exceed our customer’s every expectation,” stated Georgia Classic Pools Co-Owner, Vance Dover.

Vance, alongside his brother and business partner Joe Dover, joined GuildQuality in 2012 as a way to measure how well they delivered customer service and jump start their online marketing efforts. Prior to becoming a Guildmember, they had no formal process of gathering authentic customer feedback. They used GuildQuality to survey their customers in conjunction with the 2012 Pool & Spa News Service Excellence Award and were hooked once they began receiving survey responses from their customers.

“We really didn’t expect anyone to respond. Our customers are busy people, and we knew surveys can sometimes be a difficult ask,” Vance shared. “What really sold us on GuildQuality was the professionalism of the survey process and the response rate we did receive. It’s great to know our customers really did want to share their experience with us, and GuildQuality provided the outlet for them to do so.”

Georgia Classic Pools now surveys every customer about their pool building experience. As a team, they review every response they receive.

“Our customer’s honesty helps us to be a better business,” Vance shared. “It’s important for us to read through responses as a team and discuss them together. If we receive what we’d consider to be negative feedback, we’re able to redirect our attention and improve company-wide.”

With a 98% likely to recommend rate, Georgia Classic Pools is at an advantage in the pool industry and can promote their quality across multiple channels using GuildQuality.

“We publish customer comments we receive through GuildQuality to Facebook and Twitter directly from our surveys. We encourage our customers to engage with us through social media,” stated Vance.

Every company has a different way of delivering great customer service, for Georgia Classic Pools the recipe to a great customer relationship is simple. Always be kind, respectful, and communicate.

“I recently received a call from a customer’s husband thanking us for treating his wife so well. He was working out of town, so his wife was our main point of contact on their pool project. It was really nice of him to call us, but the funny thing is we didn’t treat his wife any differently than we’d treat any of our other customers,” Vance shared, “It’s our goal to make every customer feel as though they’re our only customer.”

For more information, take a look at Georgia Classic Pools’ customer satisfaction scores, and customer comments.

Guidebook: Nurturing and Leveraging Customer Relationships

Guidebook to Nurturing and Leveraging Customer RelationshipsThe best residential building professionals understand and respect the influence their customers have on the success of their business. Whether you are an award winning service excellence leader, or you’re trying to improve how your company delivers customer service, the Guidebook to Nurturing and Leveraging Customer Relationships provides strategies for developing long-term, quality relationships with your customers and empowering those customers to become your brand ambassadors. Download your free copy today!

Learn tips to:

  • Improve customer service at your company.
  • Measure customer satisfaction.
  • Interact with customers through social media.

Congratulations 2013 Big50 Service Excellence Award Winners

Big50 GuildQuality had the pleasure of recognizing this year’s Big50 Service Excellence Award winners at the Remodeling Magazine Leadership Conference on Friday. The Big50 Service Excellence Award recognizes incoming Big50 winners who consistently deliver an exceptional customer experience.

Congratulations to:

InSite Builders (Bethesda, MD)

Case Design/Remodeling of San Jose (San Jose, CA)

Platinum Remodeling and Handyman Services (Minneapolis, MN)

Majors Home Improvement (Milton, FL)

Advantage Contracting (Wayne, NJ)

DreamMaker of Ogden (Ogden, UT)

Roberts Construction Group (Evanston, IL)

MOSAIC Group [Architects and Remodelers] (Atlanta, GA)

To identify this year’s winners, GuildQuality used a multi-touch survey process to gather feedback from each candidate’s most recent 50 customers. Once surveying was completed, GuildQuality reviewed all  feedback received on behalf of all applicants with the editors of Remodeling Magazine and determined which companies should receive a 2013 Big50 Service Excellence Award.

 

Boosting SEO with Customer Reviews

Online customer reviews are important to companies for a variety of reasons, one of which is search engine optimization (SEO). For homebuilders, remodelers, and home services contractors, where your company appears in a prospective customer’s search matters.  Many of our members indicate that they have experienced prospective clients searching to find a remodeler or builder and seeing authentic customer reviews and testimonials on their GuildQuality profile pages.

Geoff Graham, Founder and CEO of GuildQuality recently shared with Remodeling  how remodelers’ reviews help SEO, “Whether they’re good or bad, when reviews are appropriately formatted, search engines will recognize them and weight them with more importance. Google might say, ‘I can see this review, so I’m going to return this in the search results more frequently.’”

Generating new and authentic customer reviews consistently is also important to ensuring your company maintains a strong search return. Encourage your customers to share their experiences online, it will be compelling to both search engines and prospective customers. According to this Impact of Customer Service infographic provided by Zendesk, a whopping 88% of people have researched a company online, read reviews and consulted the customer feedback when making their purchase decision. At GuildQuality, we’ve developed tools to constantly generate fresh customer content online. Through our customer satisfaction surveying GuildQuality is able to gather authentic feedback for our members to share.

For more on optimizing customer reviews for search, learn how to boost your online visibility from SEO experts featured in Remodeling.

 

GuildQuality Success Story: Window Nation On Measuring Employee Performance and Customer Service

Window Nation Guildmember, Window Nation, Inc. has become a force to be reckoned with in the residential replacement industry. With nearly 4,000 installations completed each year across Cleveland, Charlotte, all of Maryland, the DC metro, and Northern Virginia the company never loses focus on the importance of customer satisfaction.

Window Nation understands that every interaction a customer has with their company  influences their perception on the overall project experience. That’s why the company provides tools to help their employees improve their customer service skills.

“Customer service training is substantial for our employees. Every member of our team is equipped with a 100 page manual which outlines how to perform in-line with Window Nation’s standards throughout a variety of scenarios. This helps to ensure our delivery of customer service is consistent throughout the company,” Harley Magden, Co-Owner and President for Window Nation stated. “We ensure that our clients have well educated sales consultants who bring ease to their decision making process. All of our sales staff participates in a 2 week training course.”

That explains why 93% of Window Nation customers feel employees are professional and organized, and 95% are satisfied with the level of knowledge demonstrated by the Window Nation sales team.

Window Nation uses GuildQuality’s third-party customer satisfaction surveying to gather feedback from homeowners and assess how they’re performing. The company surveys all of their clients after each project is completed and reviews every response. When analyzing each survey, Window Nation uses the Bundles feature in GuildQuality’s reporting application to group similar questions together. This enables their team to get a summarized look at the overall performance for different aspects of a project.

“We measure satisfaction for each individual point throughout our customer’s project. Bonuses are tied into key indicators in our surveys,” Harley shared. “To assess how our sales team performed with a customer, we look at what scores they received for questions pertaining to sales knowledge, communication and ultimately likely to recommend. For our admins, high scores for communication and likely to recommend are critical. With our installers, we want to see whether our customers felt they were clean, safe, professional, organized, on schedule, delivered quality construction, and if they were recommendation worthy.”

Since 2011, Window Nation has received survey responses from over 5,000 of their customers using GuildQuality. A whopping 92% of those over 5,000 customers would recommend Window Nation to family and friends. In an industry that relies on word of mouth to grow business, Window Nation is doing a terrific job of giving their customers something good to talk about. Opting into GuildQuality’s review question, Window Nation receives authentic customer reviews and promotes them online.

The company shares all customer reviews directly on the home page of their website via a scrolling rss feed. Additionally, Window Nation has embedded a map of customer reviews which serves to showcase the areas in which they provide service.

Window Nation

For more information, take a look at Window Nation’s company bio, customer satisfaction scores, comments and reviews.

New BuildTools Plug-In

BuildToolsGuildQuality recently partnered with BuildTools, a construction management software for residential homebuilders and remodelers. As more and more of our members are becoming BuildTools users, the software company has developed a plug-in which will enable builders and remodelers to easily export data needed to begin surveying their customers.  The new BuildTools plug-in will enhance user experience, and provide a streamlined approach to extracting information, ultimately making the process of gathering customer feedback more efficient for builders and remodelers.