In addition to quality work and customer satisfaction, relationships are key to repeat and referral business, but those relationships may be different depending on the size and the structure of the company, points out Rick Kazmierczak, president of The Kaz Companies in West Seneca, N.Y.

Smaller companies have the advantage of more personal contact between the owner and customers, a luxury not always possible for larger enterprises like The Kaz Companies. Nevertheless, that doesn’t stop Kaz from building relationships from the first phone call. Kaz sends out biographical information on the project team member who is scheduled to make the first sales call, then that person makes a phone call prior to the appointment just to introduce himself and ask if there is anything he should bring — such as product samples and specific information.

After the job sells, project managers are expected to keep in touch with their clients. “It’s really more about being their friend today more than just being their salesman,” says Kazmierczak. “What we’re seeing is people really need to have their hands held,” he notes.

When the job is completed, the salesperson calls the client to make sure everything went well, and the lead person gives them a quality audit to fill out.

The Kaz Companies employ approximately 60 people and may have as many as 15 projects going on at one time, so “it’s hard for an owner to have a personal relationship with all of his customers, but the company can have [a more personal relationship]. We’re a customer service company that happens to do home improvements,” says Kazmierczak.

“I know what those days were like — being small — and when we really sat down and thought about some of the things we wanted to do, we had it already in place; we’d just lost track of it, and now we’re just getting ourselves back on track with it,” he says.

Another reason to keeping in touch with past customers is to remind them of other services your firm might offer. “Our biggest challenge is people don’t realize all of the services we provide,” Kazmierczak notes. The Kaz Companies, in addition to offering full-service remodeling, has a garage door and roofing division as well as a consulting service for home buyers.

Quantify your performance

Doing good work and creating customer satisfaction may be the cornerstone of repeat and referral business, but just assuming you’ve done a good job and your clients like you could be a serious mistake.

That’s where a customer satisfaction survey comes in. An increasingly popular tactic used by remodelers, it can be administered by a third-party service provider or done in-house. Either way, it shows customers their opinions counts and allows a remodeler to quantify and tabulate his performance. Just taking a survey — and doing a follow-up in six months to a year — gives the remodeler a rationale to contact former clients and keep his name in front of them.

Are the scores really meaningful? Geoff Graham of Guild Quality, a firm that provides customer satisfaction survey services, has no doubts. “We see a huge correlation between customer satisfaction, business failure and business growth,” he says.

Graham notes that a large number of remodelers approach repeat and referral business passively, depending on the fact the quality work will naturally generate the customer satisfaction necessary for recurring business and recommendations.

On the other hand, there are those who are very strategic about it and “who are building the expectation of delivering a great customer experience into their whole culture and the way they talk to customers,” he says.

They outline to customers, from a service perspective, what they are going to do in terms of keeping those customers informed and what will happen from day to day. The remodeler makes it clear that he will survey the customer at the end of the process because he’s committed to providing the best possible customer experience.

“How else could we expect you to be comfortable referring your friends and family to us?” is the ultimate sentiment communicated to each client.

Graham attributes that thought to Douglas Chuhran of Master Marketing Concepts, who uses it as a key element in his Proactive Friends and Family Referral Program. For Chuhran, it all starts with creating expectations with prospects and culminates with an emphasis on the law of reciprocity. The latter principle simply holds that if you do something to benefit someone, they’ll likely be inclined to return the favor.

For Chuhran, that means starting with expectations, following with good work and providing a “delightful experience” for the client. That is followed by a survey and then a customer package that includes high-quality before and after photos of the project, a gift card of appreciable value and a request for referrals.

In addition to keeping the remodeler at the top of his customer’s mind, surveys can perform another important function related to customer satisfaction, Graham says. The results of the surveys should be delivered to all the pertinent people in the company, he advises, from the project manager and the salesperson to the administrative team.

“When that starts to happen with a business — without even really putting any strategy into place — you end up creating a culture of quality,” Graham says. “Employees get in tune with what their customers are thinking, and they begin to think about the job in terms of how it is impacting their customers’ perspective. We tend to see a huge jump in performance when companies start to survey customers,” he adds.

Surveys make it “so much easier to quantify what it means to do a good job,” Graham says.

Graham notes that among the top priorities reported by his clients, second only to managing expenses, is keeping a strong connection to their past customers. “They are not being passive about getting repeat business,” he says.

Like Graham, Les Cunningham of Business Networks is a believer in measuring and quantifying data. Remodelers should know what their close rate is for past clients and for referrals. Establish benchmarks for your company, he advises, and once you set them take a look at what it’s going to take to increase the close rates.

Unless a remodeler can quantify customer satisfaction — and tabulating leads and referrals from past customers that are converted to sales is one way — remodelers can’t be sure whether they’re doing a good job or only think they are, Cunningham warns.

“Remodelers,” he says, “make very smart decisions when they have good data; they make dumb decisions when they have bad data or none at all.”

“There’s business out there, but it doesn’t come to you like it used to; you’ve got to aggressively go out and get it,” Cunningham says. “The mother lode is your past clients,” he adds.