Customer Feedback Is a Company Culture Cornerstone at Stone Martin Builders

When Ashley Durham joined Stone Martin Builders as its sales manager in 2018, customer feedback hadn’t yet become the center of company culture. 

While Stone Martin had already begun to communicate more regularly with customers, the change and uncertainty ushered in by COVID-19 in 2020 made it clear that the company’s growth would depend on its capacity for listening.

Stone Martin began regularly surveying customers, encouraging them to contribute online reviews and responding quickly to problems that surfaced. The resulting pivot to customer feedback has helped drive product innovations, introduce efficiencies into every aspect of the business, and fuel stellar growth that, in 2020, bumped Stone Martin onto Builder’s Magazine’s Builder 100 List for the first time.

The Opelika, Alabama, company, which was founded in 2006, now ranks 85th on the Builder’s list, nine spots higher than last year. It currently has about 45 active and coming-soon communities all across Alabama and in the west part of Georgia.

“We expect to be in the 60s next year with the growth that we have experienced,’’ Durham said. “And it’s all been organic growth.”

To bring the customer voice front and center, the company’s embraced customer feedback, including Zillow’s Builder Ratings and Reviews.

Zillow’s Ratings and Reviews is offered in partnership with Avid Ratings, a customer experience platform that translates customer reviews into actionable insights for the building industry. Durham said the partnership has been a key to the company’s growth.

The Ratings and Reviews feature helps raise the visibility of a builder’s offerings, which can help attract more high-intent buyers. It also can build trust by offering prospective customers the unadorned opinions of the people they trust most: other customers.

“The buyer in today’s market is more educated than ever before,’’ said Durham, who has worked in the industry for nearly 17 years. “They don’t get in a car with a realtor and ride around to look at five houses. They spend five hours on the internet searching and understanding who the builder is before they ever walk in the door.”

Customer feedback is the key to growth

Durham began to consider the value in reviews — the good and the bad — after hearing a prediction at an industry conference several years ago.

“They said, ‘The future of your business is your reviews,’” she said. “And that is so true. It goes for anything from buying a bike online to buying a car.”

When Durham started at Stone Martin in 2018, she partnered with the building company to create a brokerage to house all of the organization’s sales associates. The team quickly discovered a disconnect between what leadership thought was happening in the field and what customers were experiencing.  

To better understand the source of the disconnect, the entire company shifted focus from cycle times and production to customer experience, she said. To better understand the customer’s state of mind, Stone Martin began working with Avid, which recommended the company use Zillow’s Ratings and Reviews as a growth tool.

“It was a huge culture shift that we found when we initially started the Avid reviews,’’ Durham said. 

The reviews, she said, reflected “the truth of what was happening in the field. You could have a group of five leaders sitting around the table going, ‘I think this is happening. Or I think this is happening. Or I think we need to improve this.’ But until you get the customers’ feedback, it’s all for naught. The customer is the one who is going to tell you what’s really happening out there.”

Stone Martin has since leaned heavily into surveys and reviews to get a deeper understanding of whether processes that looked good on paper serve the customer at every stage of the process.

Stone Martin seeks reviews early and often

Reviews have become so essential to Stone Martin that they’re now a basis for bonusing field and sales teams, Durham said. 

The feedback process starts when the contract is signed. Stone Martin tells its customers that they want their reviews, will be asking for them often and value them highly, she said.

The company’s CRM system solicits reviews from customers at key points: as a prospect, as a contract buyer, 30 days before the closing, and post-closing. The company also encourages reviews on Google and other platforms, and sends customers instructions on how to leave feedback.

Customers are surveyed by agents at closing, and by the warranty department at 30 days and after the customer has owned the home for a year.

The frequent check-ins help spot problems early, and help raise the online presence of happy customers who don’t tend to comment as much as disgruntled ones.

Both “good” and “bad” reviews provide opportunities to grow 

The company’s reviews trend positive, Durham said, but they also show when the company is missing the mark or when an employee might need additional training, education or support. 

Reviews that include complaints or cite problems are vetted by a department the company  created specifically for that function. The department pieces together a comprehensive narrative that includes additional details from the customer and field staff and sales’ perspectives. The company then determines whether the breakdown was a fluke or the result of a flawed process.

The earliest and most significant issue revealed by the reviews was the need for frequent communication with customers at a time when home had become the all-encompassing center of people’s lives, Durham said. 

“During COVID, for the first time in the history of the company, we realized we have to talk to our customers every week or we risked losing our entire backlog,’’ she said. The owner reached out to customers weekly with email updates, and a new protocol was established requiring the sales team to either call, video, text or send pictures to every customer weekly to update them on the progress of their home.

When reviews showed that customers were feeling rushed at the walkthrough, the company dug down to see whether its walkthrough protocols were being followed. The result was a series of training videos to show how walkthroughs should unfold for the customer.

The reviews and surveys drove change in other areas, too, said Durham. They helped uncover inefficiencies in production, and led to a new audit process for architecture and estimating.

Meanwhile, positive reviews became marketing testimonials, helping build confidence in the product and the builder in a way that customers value and trust more than if the company were tooting its own horn, she said.

And they’re good for morale, especially when Durham can share with employees the nice things that customers have said about them.

Feedback leads to product changes that lead to good reviews

Durham said positive reviews confirm when the company is aligned with customer needs, especially at a time when people are changing how they live in their homes and what they want from them.

“After COVID, we found that customers wanted one extra space in their home. They wanted outdoor living to get out of the house. And they wanted quite a few finishing changes. So we adapted to all of that,’’ she said. “We adjusted all of our architecture, we adjusted all our selections.”

The pleasure customers feel about those changes, which included more high-end finishes and smart home features, is reflected in positive reviews that help differentiate the company from its competitors, according to Durham. 

“Customers can choose from anyone,’’ she said. “We’re all dealing with the same struggles. We’re all dealing with the same lumber prices. We’re all dealing with the same lot inventory. The buyer might not have a lot of finished homes to choose from, but they have plenty of builders to choose from.”

Better listening, she said, means Stone Martin can better compete for their business.