How the QA Program Will Serve You Better!

Posted on:

December 8, 2021

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Thank you to the contractors who responded to our “Help Us Serve You Better!” survey. We found your feedback to be extremely helpful and look forward to serving you better. Our program moving forward looks bright!

What are we doing to improve the QA Program?

First, we are taking steps to make our QA Contractor Directory Requests for Information emails clearer and more useful for the contractor. QA Contractors are receiving a lot of requests for information through our QA Contractor Directory. In fact, through recent months, there were 678 requests for information sent to QA accredited contractors, and we hope our email improvement makes it easier to identify requests for information that are coming from the QA Contractor Directory. It is important to know that when searching on our ACCA Contractor Locator, QA Accredited contractors are listed near the top of the page, which makes those contractors more likely to be seen and get more referrals. We’re preparing to roll out new Contractor Locator features that will allow contractors to personalize their listings and review their full history of requests for information more easily.

Builders also use our QA Contractor Directory to look for Quality Assured (QA) Accredited Contractors. Contractors looking for ENERGY STAR® Certified Homes projects can find the Eligible ENERGY STAR Builder List on the ENERGY STAR® website.

We received feedback that 37.5% of QA Accredited contractors had their sales increase between 10% and 30%. To help increase your company sales, we will continue to promote our newly accredited contractors through our press releases and social media posts through sites such as LinkedIn and Facebook. We will also provide sample materials and real-world examples to help QA Accredited contractors advertise the importance of quality over price to homeowners inquiring about HVAC system replacement.

We received feedback that online training could be offered. We want to point out that we do have a QA Orientation that contractors go through as a part of becoming accredited. Also, we do have Qtech On-Demand training, which offers affordable HVAC training & certification on topics like Field Practices for Quality Installation and Home Evaluation and Performance Improvement. We hope you will consider joining ACCA for deep discounts on training and your QA accreditation fees.

With our partnership with EPA and Pearl Certification, we continue to encourage more contractors to become Residential Service & Installation (RSI) accredited so that they can provide the ENERGY STAR Verified HVAC Installation (ESVI) Certificate to their customers when completing a quality installation of qualifying HVAC equipment. We also plan to improve our QI Mobile App. Our goal for this app is to make it easy and convenient for contractors to input information. For equipment that doesn’t meet ENERGY STAR® efficiency requirements, contractors can earn an ACCA Quality Installation (QI) Certificate. Learn more about our Existing Homes Program.

Our QA Program is widely recognized as credible, and we welcome our accredited contractors to display the QA Program logo on their website. This lets users who visit your website know that you value quality HVAC work. Based upon your feedback, we can develop marketing templates for outreach to homeowners about the importance of working with QA accredited contractors. We plan to expand our outreach to builders, raters, and other quality organizations promoting the use of QA contractors and the QA Directory. We will also continue advocating for public policies that provide incentives for working with QA contractors and verifying quality work with QI/ESVI certificates.

Overall, we will do our best to make sure that the QA Program continues to be a strong, widely recognized program that promotes accredited contractors and quality installation! If you are an ACCA Member who is not an accredited contractor, we hope you are compelled to apply!