RatePoint

Customer Feedback Data in the New RatePoint Dashboard

May 17, 2008 – 8:08 pm
Posted by Ron Ayers

The new RatePoint Dashboard is here!

The latest update to the RatePoint Business Center features a significant addition which is sure to help you more effectively manage your account and track your progress as you utilize your RatePoint Membership.

This new feature allows you to check the status of your business and your RatePoint account at a glance. The dashboard provides you with useful graphs, critical data such as your overall RatePoint scores (both before and after dispute resolution), how your business is performing over time, and your site seal activity. In addition you’ll be able to quickly see if there are reviews that need to be approved or disputes that need to be resolved.

For new members, these reports and data will become available in your Business Center as soon as you start collecting reviews and/or post your RatePoint site seal.

In addition, you’ll be able to get the latest news, updates and articles from the RatePoint Blog conveniently located on the right side of the dashboard. If you didn’t know our blog existed, you do now.

We hope you enjoy this latest addition to you RatePoint membership, and as always if you have any questions or comments, feel free to e-mail us or leave a comment below!

Posted in Announcements, Customer Feedback, Development, Features, News | No Comments »

Business Center Update

May 9, 2008 – 8:31 am
Posted by Ron Ayers

As you may have noticed as you logged into the RatePoint Business Center this morning, we’ve totally reskinned the user interface to be a little more friendlier and flexible as we add new features.

We still have some tweaking to do on the content layout, but it’s a big step forward. We hope you enjoy the new update.

If you have any comments or suggestions on the new layout, be sure to e-mail us or leave a comment below!

Posted in Announcements, Development, Features | No Comments »

RatePoint Feature Update

April 29, 2008 – 12:26 pm
Posted by Ron Ayers

As we mentioned last week we pushed out a new RatePoint feature update that address a few functionality areas.

This latest update includes:

• New horizonal review widget for display reviews directly on your website.
• Small UI fixes for the e-mail marketing tools.
• General stability and fixes that the average business owner won’t recognize but will make life better.

Nothing jaw-dropping, but enough to make the world a slightly better place!

Posted in Development, Features | No Comments »

Free Marketing and Business Webinars for RatePoint Members

April 24, 2008 – 10:04 am
Posted by Ron Ayers

Yesterday we held one of our first webinars which was focused on our new e-mail marketing feature. We received a ton of questions at the end of the webinar, and we’ll be reaching out with answers over the next few days. We’ll also try to post some of the best questions here. Thank you to everyone who attended!

The RatePoint system has become fairly robust over the past few months as we rapidly add new functionality and enhancements to the service. We’ll be holding additional webinars focused on these features, as well as some some general marketing and business webinars that of course will be free for our members.

If there is a particular subject or category you want to see us cover, be sure to drop us an e-mail at support@ratepoint.com and we’ll see what we can do!

Posted in Announcements | No Comments »

Small Business Anxiety Over Alexa

April 17, 2008 – 10:05 am
Posted by Ron Ayers

Over the years, Alexa has been a punchline for Internet professionals and businesses owners who are “in-the-know.” In their opinion the data has always been flawed (primarily coming from the Alexa Toolbar users), their rankings would fluctuate wildly, especially once you were above the 50,000 mark, and in the end was derailed by many as not being a good indicator of how a business is really doing on the web.

Regardless, today a lot of small businesses use Alexa as their primary indicator of how they’re doing on the web and today they’re freaking out as Alexa announced some dramatic changes to the way their rankings work. A significant number of businesses found that their rankings dropped like a rock once the new changes were in place and they started going crazy.

It’s very important for small business owners to take a step back and remember:

Your website is the same.
Your traffic is the same.
Your pageviews are the same.
The past has not changed.

Regardless of what happened to your Alexa Ranking in their update, it’s important to as a small business owner that data from sites like Alexa shouldn’t be the only indicator of the success of your website.

In our business we find these tools to be exceptionally helpful when tracking trends especially in relation to our competitors, but in the end your internal goals that lead to revenue such as leads, conversions, and actual traffic should dictate how successful your feel your business is. You can tell the world your business is #42,000 on Alexa, but if you have no paying customers is your business really that successful?

If you aren’t using a statistics or analytics package such as Google Analytics or Mint, you should be. These tools really allow you to get a solid idea how much traffic you really have, and if you’re growing it. These programs track in great detail your websites traffic, including visitors, pageviews and how people are getting to your site. By tracking actual people visiting your website you’ll start to get a very good snapshot of your website’s progress. If you have website logs available, some of these packages will built reports from the past for you giving you a head start.

In my opinion, the new changes that Alexa have made are definitely for the better and make Alexa’s product much more useful to the business owner. Their service is now on par with Compete.com and Quantcast.  In the end though successful businesses aren’t built off of rankings, they’re built on customers and revenue.

Posted in Business, News | No Comments »

Successful Small Businesses Don’t Grandstand.

April 14, 2008 – 12:47 pm
Posted by Ron Ayers

It never ceases to amaze me at the sheer level of self-aggrandizing statements that businesses make. In today’s business world, they could be more detrimental to a business’ online reputation than helpful, especially when they’re nowhere near the truth.

Business owners who find themselves at the bottom of the ladder, either because they’re small or new, find it very difficult to resist the temptation to call themselves “the best” or “#1″ or “the first.” This strategy worked well in an era when there were no resources or tools for consumers to quickly determine the quality of a business.

In today’s business environment, saying that you’re the best may be a clear sign to a consumer that you’re not.

I took a few minutes to surf around the net and here are a couple quick examples of what I found on business websites that clearly were not in the top of their fields:

“We are the best web hosting company on the internet today!” Ironically the site that had this statement on it was broken in my web browser.

“#1 in Customer Satisfaction Since 1997″ I’m curious to figure out who these guys dethroned before their 11 year reign at the top.

There are many more examples like this across the Internet, but just because everyone else is doing it doesn’t mean it’s okay. In every industry, a very small slice of businesses can conceivably call themselves “#1″ or “the best” or even be involved in the discussion. Customers understand that. They’re looking for other businesses because of other qualities such as personalized service, selection, availability and location that “the best” cannot necessarily provide.

Here’s some small business marketing tips to help you avoid some common self-promotion traps:

1. Ask yourself who “the best” is in your industry.
   If you come up with a different answer than your own business, your customers probably will too. Calling yourself “the best” in this case is almost as good as telling your customers that you’re a liar. This also applies to calling yourself “the first” which can sometimes be even more damaging, because there’s only one, and if it’s not you…
2. Look at the best in your industry. Now look at your own business.
   What sets you apart? It’s important for small business owners to identify the qualities that set themselves apart from the big-names and highlight them appropriately. Larger more established companies cannot compete on every level with a small business. Pick and choose your battles.
3. Beware of qualifying statements.
   Too many can make you look foolish. I just may be the best short suburban business blogger drinking coffee in Needham, MA. Then again, I may be the only one right now.
4. While you may not be the best, you can strive to be the best.
   Customers become loyal, returning customers when a business makes every effort to make sure their experience is a good one. There is no harm in letting your customers know that this is your goal. It’s your job to make sure that the effort is consistently there.
5. As always, go with the gut.
   If you feel funny writing some text on your website or promotional material or have questions about it. — you’re probably onto something.

By focusing more on the better qualities of your business and taking a realistic approach to self-promotion you will spend less time trying to justify the position of your business in the market to your customers and more time selling to them.

Posted in Business | 1 Comment »

RatePoint Does E-Mail Marketing, New Site Seals

April 10, 2008 – 12:56 pm
Posted by Ron Ayers

The development team put together a monumental effort in putting together some extremely useful new tools and features for this most recent release. These tools are now ready for RatePoint members to use in our Business Center today:

1. E-Mail Marketing. For small businesses that would like to send out e-mails to their customers such as newsletters, promotional offers, and updates, we’re pleased to announced that the first edition of our e-mail marketing tool is now ready in the business center. Mailing lists and newsletters are a great way to build customer loyalty and solicit customer feedback. This early version of the e-mail marketing tool was designed for business owners who are new to the e-mail game and will quickly allow you to put together a great looking e-mail campaign to send out to your clients. It has many of the bells and whistles you may see in a system like Constant Contact or Campaign Monitor, but without the additional cost. It’s all part of a RatePoint membership.
2. New Site Seals.  Over time, our new site seals have slowly been evolving to meet the rapidly changing needs of RatePoint members. Today, we’ve released three new site seal designs in three different colors that will help businesses better display their quality to potential customers. New seal code is available in your Business Center.
3. Survey Enhancements. We’ve added some additional survey question styles include a “matrix” style. This will allow you to group multiple questions in common subject areas and better interpret the data.
4. Dispute Resolution Enhancements. As we previously mentioned, we’ve streamlined the dispute resolution process to request additional information regarding a negative review. This will speed up the customer service process and in the end ultimately result in a satisified customer in a shorter period of time.

Please be sure to log-in to your Business Center today and check out these new features, or if you’re not a RatePoint Member.
Sign-up for a free 30-day trial and learn more!

Posted in Announcements, Customer Feedback, Development, Features, News | No Comments »

Big Release Coming. RatePoint in the Wall Street Journal

April 3, 2008 – 2:00 pm
Posted by Ron Ayers

We’re preparing for a significant release over here in the next few days. Once it’s out the door, we’ll give you some updates on what’s new and groovy in the RatePoint Business Center.

RatePoint was mentioned in the print edition of Wall Street Journal on Monday in it’s Technology section. The article “Just for You” focuses on how websites are trying to personalize their experience with their customers. If you haven’t tossed your WSJ into the circular file yet, be sure to dig it up and take a read.

Posted in Development, News | No Comments »

New RatePoint Release, Dispute Resolution Enhancements

March 26, 2008 – 9:10 am
Posted by Ron Ayers

The development team has been hard at work, putting out a new release this week that enhances our dispute resolution process.

So far we’ve seen an outstanding rate of success in resolving negative reviews with our service. Over 90% of negative reviews have been resolved through our dispute resolution system. This is really critical because when a dispute is resolved, that customer is less likely to tell others about a negative experience, and more likely to remain a loyal customer. Our latest release is focused around helping businesses resolve their disputes faster and more efficiently:

• We now prompt customers to provide some additional information such as an Order # and the name or e-mail address on the account to help you get to the root of the problem.
• The user interface has been enhanced with larger buttons and clearer text to make the system more usable.
• Sorting options have been added to the Business Center to allow for quick searching.
• Customers are now prompted to add a review after the dispute process is over. This is a biggie, because we’ve seen some tremendously happy customers who wish to write a review about a business after the process has been completed. This is especially true for those customers who receive service from businesses that go well beyond the call of duty to make sure their issue is remedied.

Posted in Development, Features | No Comments »

RatePoint in the News

March 20, 2008 – 9:53 am
Posted by Ron Ayers

We’re pretty excited over here as RatePoint was featured in an Associated Press article earlier this week! The article was picked up by over 100 different online publications including the Seattle Times, the San Francisco Chronicle and The Washington Post. The story was also picked up by a handful of blogs as well. The entries are always interesting to read, because their viewpoints tend to be drawn from a much wider array of personal experiences and how much knowledge they have about what we do.

Posted in News | No Comments »