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NRS Remodeler Winners: The Golden Rule

Achieving excellence in service and referrals requires a customer-first culture

Kimberly Sweet, Editor
October 31, 2005
HousingZone

Sidebars:
The Survey Says: Genuine caring is the best measure of customer satisfaction

Service is what separates the truly professional remodeler from the rest. Remodelers who not only get the job done but also answer questions, soothe fears, clean up, listen well and provide choices create true value for their clients.

Remodelers like this also create referrals for themselves. It's a lesson that the winners of this year's NRS Awards for customer satisfaction have taken to heart. JW Bratton Design/Build of Renton, Wash., and Bowers Design Build of McLean, Va., both have arrived at a level where 100 percent of their clients are willing to recommend them to family and friends.

For JW Bratton, a family-owned and -operated company, being in the remodeling business starts with customer satisfaction.

"If you're interested in working for me, you have a simple job description: It's to remodel your mother's kitchen every day," says owner John Bratton. "All we want to do is to treat our clients the way we would want ourselves and our families to be treated."

On the opposite end of the country, Bowers Design/Build has more employees and bigger projects, but the same values.

"One of the things everyone enjoys about working with this firm is that honesty and integrity is key," says Wilma Bowers, executive director of marketing and strategic planning. "We would not commit to anything unless we knew we could deliver." She adds: "We stress that this is a partnership in spirit, that we're going through this together."

Caring can't be taught, but it should be cultivated, because customers' impression of how much your firm cares might be the most important factor in what they think of it. (See "The Survey Says" sidebar.) A look inside both Bratton and Bowers reveals service-oriented practices that any firm can adapt to develop a customer-first culture.

The Survey Says: Genuine caring is the best measure of customer satisfaction

If you're like most remodelers, you're always on the lookout for ways to improve your customer satisfaction. That's because you know that high satisfaction leads to lucrative referrals, which generate the vast majority of remodeling business.

Using a customer survey will help you to quantify your clients' level of satisfaction and pinpoint areas for improvement. The results of the fourth annual customer satisfaction study by NRS Corporation and Professional Remodeler provide a big-picture look at where remodelers do well keeping customers happy and where they fall short.

NRS asked the 2004 customers of the 241 remodeler and builder study participants a series of key questions, including:

  • Would you recommend your remodeler to family and friends?
  • How many actual recommendations have you made for your remodeler?
  • To what degree did your remodeler care about you and building a quality home?

This was the first year we asked the "caring question," and we were shocked to discover how much the answer mattered to consumers. The higher the firm scored in terms of "genuine caring," the more actual recommendations its clients had made. High satisfaction with the remodeler's level of caring predicted recommendation levels better than any other question asked, from project value to sticking with the schedule.

Two remodeling companies rose to the top of the study, winning the 2005 NRS Awards recognizing excellence in customer satisfaction. Both of these remodelers had 100 percent of their customers stating that they felt their remodeler's staff cared about them and about doing a quality job.

Caring doesn't exist in a vacuum relative to the quality of the work you do; rather, caring is the sum of all that you do for your customers. Remodelers that give warm fuzzies without performing quality work ultimately will fail in customer satisfaction. However, remodelers that do great work but fail to convey caring toward the customer will also underperform.

The NRS survey measured customer satisfaction levels via a mailed questionnaire and an online survey. Winners were determined by adding their total customer satisfaction score with their recommend score to equal the NRS Index score. The NRS Award program announces only the winners in the award categories, and it holds in confidence the results for companies that subscribed to the study but did not win.

Paul A. Cardis is president/CEO of NRS Corporation, a leading research and consulting firm serving the construction industry.


© 2009, Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All Rights Reserved.

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