GuildQuality & Qualified Remodeler: 2017 Customer Satisfaction Report

For the third year in a row, GuildQuality partnered with Qualified Remodeler to compile their annual Customer Satisfaction Report for QR’s July 2017 issue. The report profiles 60 award-winning remodelers and replacement contractors who understand the importance of delivering exceptional customer service. In addition to these profiles, the report also includes a heat map of highly valued service traits.

To Qualified Remodeler, the goal of presenting this data is threefold:

“Increase the stature of customer satisfaction as a business building block, provide hard data that proves the correlation of other factors that drive satisfaction, beyond price and quality, and to flesh out those drivers over many different job types.”

Client Experience Leaders

The Client Experience Leaders list profiles 60 remodelers and home improvement contractors a part of the GuildQuality community whose exemplary customer satisfaction scores deserve both recognition and study. Within each profile, company leaders share their best practices, reflect on a situation where they turned a negative into a positive, and express how they use client feedback to grow their business. Cheers to our Guildmembers who are part of the select 60 this year (see below for complete list)!

Heatmap of Highly Valued Service Traits

As a third-party customer satisfaction surveying company, we’re privy to incredibly valuable information regarding homeowner satisfaction. Over the years, we’ve surveyed thousands of homeowners about their experience throughout a remodeling or home improvement project, and as a result, we’ve been able to recognize emerging patterns or trends within the residential construction industry. Qualified Remodeler’s Bubble Matrix compiles GuildQuality survey data from over 100,000 homeowners to determine how impactful 17 key satisfaction areas (vertical axis) are across 40 common home improvement job types (horizontal axis).

Graphic by Tracy Hegg

Click here to view a bigger version of the full heat map.

How to read the bubble matrix: For this matrix, Qualified Remodeler used the Pearson Coefficient – which describes the strength of the relationship between two variables (-1 to 1) – to determine the correlation between overall satisfaction and the above service traits, across different job/project types. At GuildQuality, we use a “Likely to Recommend” question to gauge overall satisfaction for homeowners. That means that if a respondent answers 3 or 4 (between 0 and 4) to that question, that means they’re satisfied with everything overall. To clearly show what exactly has the strongest correlation, the size of each bubble corresponds to the strength of the correlation (i.e. the higher the number, the larger the bubble).

For example, the correlation between budget and overall satisfaction for a “Design” job is extremely high. This means that surveys that have positive responses to the budget question are more likely to have positive responses to the ‘Likely to Recommend’ question. On the flip side, there are some questions that have a very small correlation to the ‘Likely to Recommend’ question, which means they are not reliable predictors of overall satisfaction.

With that said, there are some service traits across all job types that highly correlate to general satisfaction. According to this year’s data, the three most important areas to homeowners are:

1. Problem resolution
2. Trust
3. Value

In addition to these three, communication and quality of workmanship are also important factors in determining whether or not a homeowner is generally satisfied.

August 2 Update: It’s come to our attention that the original 2016 ‘Likely to Recommend’ (LTR) data (provided by GuildQuality) was inaccurate in several cases. Listed below are the true 2016 LTR percentages for our Guildmembers. Qualified Remodeler has since updated the scores within their digital issue to reflect the ones listed below.