Qualified Remodeler Magazine

JUL 2017

Qualified Remodeler helps independent remodeling firms to survive, become more professional and more profitable by providing must-have business information, namely best business practices, new product information and timely design ideas.

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he building blocks of any successful remodeling or home improvement business are many. ere must be a firm handle on overhead, job costs, estimating, pricing and production, just to name a few. Further down that list but of equal importance is customer satisfaction strategy and measurement. Remodelers usually come into the industry with a clear sense of what it takes to make customers happy. New remodelers often come with years of experience in carpentry and project management. e thinking is that happy customers are the natural byproduct of quality workmanship, fair prices and a friendly demeanor. But as GuildQuality and thousands of remodelers around the country learn, there's a lot more to it. Customer satisfaction is a discipline unto itself and is a foundational building block of any profitable and long-term survivor in remodeling. Twelve years ago, Qualified Remodeler offered the first of five an- nual surveys on customer satisfaction, running from 2005 to 2010. By surveying clients who had recently completed remodeling work, the research netted new insights into the client-relationship traits that correlated most closely with high rates of those clients who expressed a willingness to refer their remodeler. e results of those early surveys showed that timeliness, jobsite cleanliness and communication were critically important to the remodeler-client relationship. ey consis- tently ranked higher than fair prices and quality of workmanship—the very attributes most remodelers rely on for client happiness when they come to this industry. Of all the building blocks to a solid remodeling business, client satis- faction seemed to be getting the least attention. at was and remains today a big disconnect. Remodelers feel they are doing everything possible to make their clients happy while, in fact, seemingly small behaviors have permanently sidetracked client relationships. Customer by customer, this translates to lower levels of repeats and referrals. Both Reputation Building Blocks The third annual Qualified Remodeler /GuildQuality customer satisfaction report offers new insights on cornerstone tactics for happy clients and highlights 60 remodeling firms leading the way. This report was edited and written by Kacey Larsen, Kyle Clapham and Patrick O'Toole with the data and graphics collaboration of Alex Overall, Justin Ruckman, Baily D'Alessio and Robyn Hazelton at GuildQuality. T are the lifeblood of most sustainable remodeling enterprises. Perhaps most telling was and is the frustration of many remodelers who simply did not have the right information to recognize their client satisfaction shortcomings, or to pursue new behaviors to put future client relation- ships on the right track. Lastly, they lacked the objective customer feedback, collected by a third party, that would help them get started. NEW PARTNERS AND BETTER FINDINGS Over the years, GuildQuality has emerged a leader in customer sat- isfaction measurement. Its simplified online process of surveying a remodeler's recent clients nets clear and actionable results for thou- sands of remodelers and home improvement firms in all 50 states and Canada. Each year they collect tens of thousands of survey results. In the aggregate, those survey results tell a story. ey show the pain points and positive interactions associated with a wide variety of job types. For example, cleanliness of jobsites is more important on major remodeling projects affecting interior spaces than it is on exterior proj- ects. Starting three years ago, Qualified Remodeler and GuildQuality partnered to create its first "heat map" using their reams of data to draw correlations between homeowner satisfaction traits and the 40 most common types of remodeling projects. To date it has been a successful partnership. And most important from the perspective of the Qualified Remodeler editorial team, it continues its long-held commitment to communicating the significance of customer satisfaction as a critical remodeling business building block. With each successive iteration of the Qualified Remodeler/GuildQuality heat map, changes have been made to improve the data. is year the analytics team at GuildQuality—particularly data expert Alex Overall—intro- duced a new, more accurate way of gauging the sensitive correlations between behaviors and results. It is called the Pearson Coefficient. [Please see the explanation of this change on pg. 53 for more details.] SPECIAL REPORT: Customer Satisfaction 40 July 2017 QR QualifiedRemodeler.com

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