I have often wondered about the value and dangers of the proliferation of unmonitored rating systems for everything from hotels and books, to doctors, lawyers, and real estate agents. Gaining increased consumer input and user generated content is a good thing. However, what about false positives for the service provider, false negatives from their competitors, and overly emotional reactions from consumers with no opportunity for the service to provider to answer or often be aware of the commentary.

I recently spoke with Neal Creighton, co-founder and CEO of RatePoint, a firm that was started to address this issue. Neal has background in web security. He was the founder of GeoTrust, later acquired by VeriSign. Neal also noticed the trend and issues that I mentioned above. Rate Point was launched in September 2006 and the initial release was available in June 2007. As Neal explained, maintaining valued perceptions by customers on service and product quality is pivotal in ensuring small-business success and growth of the customer base. RatePoint enables business owners to manage their reputation online and proactively mediate consumer complaints and feedback.

To ensure authenticity, RatePoint manages the customer feedback process and sets a number of standards and requirements for their customers. This is a smart move as it provides consumer confidence in the ratings and the customers who use the system.

There are several ways companies can engage RatePoint. They can place the RatePoint seal or review widget on their site as a means to get to a rating and feedback screen such as this one for the Marena Group. RatePoint also provides email marketing tools to make it easier for businesses to proactively and regularly ask customers for feedback.

Here is a summary of results for the Marena Group.

The process works like this. A customer places a comment and a rating on the company site. If it is a negative comment, the company has an opportunity to reach out to that customer to try to resolve the issue before their comment is posted. If the company can resolve the issue successfully, the negative comment is not posted but only if the customer agrees. If the customer does not agree to the resolution, their comment is posted and the company has an opportunity to post a response. You can view comments sorted by most or least recent and by highest and lowest ratings. I think this is a nice balance between allowing customers to express their feelings, allowing companies to respond, and achieving transparency.

RatePoint recently offered an Enterprise version to build existing RatePoint features to provide broader support. Here is a summary of the RatePoint Enterprise solutions:

Dispute resolution. RatePoint Enterprise’s platform handles mass customer inquiries and disputes while enabling customer service departments to respond efficiently in situations such as product defects, recalls or other far-reaching issues.

Distributed administration. RatePoint Enterprise can be rolled into multiple business units within an organization to route specific customer inquiries or disputes to the relevant departments, decreasing time to resolution.

Advanced user management. RatePoint Enterprise offers a multi-user environment with role-based access to varying levels of data and customer records.

Advance reporting and analysis. The platform provides an advanced trending and analysis tool that enables managers of different departments to manage dispute progress and areas of customer satisfactions.

E-mail marketing and surveys. RatePoint Enterprise enables businesses to communicate with as many as 25,000 customers via e-mail marketing and issue surveys to gauge customer satisfaction and solicit feedback on services and trends.
There are several ways that RatePoint can be implemented. Here is a screen shot of another variation, Customer Testimonials, as used by Aubuchon Hardware.

Neal said they are the only firm they know of operating in the space so far. I think they have staked out a good market need. It takes a consumer web trend and online rating systems, and makes it more enterprise friendly, without compromising the legitimacy of consumer reporting.

RatePoint was mentioned as a vendor to watch in Gartner’s August Hype Circle for Social Software, which notes Internet Reputation Management as a market niche to watch due to its high value for businesses and status as an emerging technology. Gartner defines Internet Reputation Management as “the proactive process of tracking and responding to threats and opportunities related to an enterprise’s online image affected by traditional and social media alike on the Web.”