Winsett: How to use BBB customer reviews to guide your purchase decisions

Jim Winsett of the BBB.
Jim Winsett of the BBB.
photo Jim Winsett of the BBB.
Q. Please explain the BBB Customer Reviews program feature on its webpage?

A. As an example, the middle of summertime is here and you are ready to gather your family for that vacation at the beach. You have checked your favorite hotel in the area and its booked, so what do you do now? If you are like many consumers, you begin by checking other hotels online. The first thing that catches your attention is customer reviews (star ratings).

Customer reviews are an integral part of today's marketplace and play a major role in consumers' decision-making process. Customer reviews can and do impact sales and most businesses closely watch customer reviews as part of their reputation management policies and procedures.

How much do you trust any company's positive or negative customer reviews with any business review? Are they real? It may come as a surprise but sometimes those customer reviews are not from actual customers, but may have been generated by someone sitting behind a computer in Asia or anywhere in the world.

So what is a consumer to do? Better Business Bureau recommends you Start With Trust®. Following years of testing and preparation, Better Business Bureau now offers BBB Customer Reviews as a trusted consumer option on BBB Business Reviews.

The goal of BBB Customer Reviews is to provide additional information on companies to help potential customers make educated purchasing decisions as well as provide them a way to offer positive feedback with BBB. Reviews also allow businesses to demonstrate how they interact with their customers.

BBB Customer Reviews allow customers to post positive, negative or neutral reviews about businesses with which they have done business. All Customer Reviews will be vetted by BBB team members before they are published online and reviewers, upon request, must be able to provide substantiation of the marketplace interactions.

Customer reviews will be verified by a BBB professional and a business will have the opportunity to respond in detail or inform us that the consumer did not do business with a company before the review is posted.

BBB Customer Reviews are submitted directly from any company BBB Business Review. Once submitted, the BBB reviewer will confirm the review via email. A valid email address is required to post Customer Reviews.

BBB team members then verify each customer review to determine that real marketplace interactions have occurred and both the business and reviewer (consumer) have the opportunity to submit comments on the review.

A business will have three follow-up options once a BBB Customer Review is received:

Ignore: If the business chooses to ignore the review, BBB will automatically publish it within three to 10 days.

Respond: If the business responds to the review, the response will be forwarded to the customer and published. This is an opportunity for the business to respond courteously to any of their customers' reviews and open up lines of communication, or simply say "thank you."

Challenge: If the business challenges the review, BBB will alert the customer and request substantiation of the marketplace interaction.

A consumer may not submit both a customer review and a complaint. A consumer with a negative experience must choose one or the other.

Businesses that dispute whether the customer had a marketplace interaction can have the customer review suspended while BBB seeks further evidence. Consumer IP (web) addresses are tracked and monitored for repeat users, and can be blacklisted if necessary to prevent abuse.

BBB encourages business to promote use of customer reviews and for consumers to post customer reviews. This is an opportunity to express thanks for service excellence and a business meeting and exceeding expectations. Consumers are quick to complain, but slow to show appreciation. BBB has vision of a marketplace where consumer and business trust each other implicitly.

Jim Winsett is president of the Better Business Bureau of Chattanooga.

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