Moving the Bar Up: The AVID Awards

While America’s housing industry is in recession, winning customer satisfaction ratings — surveyed from 14,624 customers — are still rising in the annual AVID Award for the Best Customer Experience in the U.S.

This year’s winners chart a path for builders to follow, leading to higher referral sales. While some operational areas where winners post their highest scores are surprising, others hit foundational principles of customer coddling.

The Surprises:

• All three AVID Award winners list “reasonable costs for options and upgrades” in their Top Five scores. This area began showing up as important several years ago, even though no winners say they price upgrades exceptionally low.

• Landscaping makes the Top Five for two of the three winners, a surprise because it’s a difficult area in which to score well. Landscape may be important now because densities are rising and greenery protects privacy.

The Solid Rocks:

• Correcting walk-through items fast is a Top Five score for all three winners and No. 1 for winners of the Diamond Award (top score in the competition) and the big-builder category (300 closings a year). It’s almost impossible to build a zero-defect house. The next best thing is to clear up issues faster than customers expect.

• Clean and ready at closing hits the Top Five for two of three winners. Being complete is a universal expectation. Cleanliness is next to Godliness.

Read on to see how this sample of this year’s AVID Award winners stacks up.