Survey your customers

The question of customer surveys came up in a recent post by Remodelers Advantage president Victoria Downing. It prompted this letter from a reader:

Hi Rob,
In the article there is talk about the office manager putting together a Flash Report which includes “client evaluation scores received.” I’m assuming this is from client surveys handed in. I am fairly new to this business and have been researching a client survey for the contracting business I work for. Are there any web-sites with tips that you can point me to and/or what questions are the most relevant?

Thank-you,

Lesa Filep, Allwright Contracting Ltd., Victoria Beach, MB

It turns out, Andy Foot, partner in Dwell Design Build Inc. of Toronto mentioned his customer survey during our recent Go Rici Roundtable discussion at Construct Canada in November of last year. I suggested to Lesa that she contact Andy, and Andy wrote back: 

Hi Lisa:

Thanks for reaching out.  We decided to use GuildQuality for a couple of reasons. Number one, we wanted honest feedback from our clients. We felt that having a third party survey our clients would help our clients feel more comfortable in giving an honest response. We cannot manipulate the results or scores and we can benchmark ourselves against our Remodelers Advantage Peer Group. The reporting engine is amazing. You can slice and dice the data by project manager for bonus or employee review purposes.  On larger projects we survey our clients up to 4-5 times during the project life cycle and a year after project completion. Our feeling is if you survey a client after completion there is little opportunity to correct or adjust to any issues raised.

You can take a look at our Guild Quality page on our website. 

When prospective clients are exploring our site we actually link them to the GuildQuality site to show our results. We hope that the prospective client understands our commitment to quality and continuous improvement. (there are not many companies in Canada doing this – we hope we stand out from the crowd so to speak – differentiation is key to our success especially early in the sales cycle.)

I recommend you reach out to Laura Summerlin at GuildQuality. She is amazing an will be able to do a much better job than I in describing all the features

By all means if you have any other question I would be happy to help

Cheers
Andy
Partner
Dwell Design Build Inc.

I also mentioned David Litwiller, president of Litwiller Developments in Calgary, and gave her his email address. David wrote back and provided a copy of the survey he gives to his clients a month after the job is complete. Here’s his response and his survey:

I have been delivering these to customers one month after completion with a stamped self addressed envelope. The one month gives them a bit of time to get over the pain of renovating but not too much time to forget our processes.

Hope this helps,
David

Litwiller Customer Survey

If a customer survey is in your plans, you might want to try Andy’s or David’s.