RatePoint

RatePoint Does E-Mail Marketing, New Site Seals

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

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.

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New RatePoint Release, Dispute Resolution Enhancements

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.

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RatePoint in the News

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.

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Communicating with Customers through Blog Comments

A good question was asked during a recent webinar that RatePoint hosted regarding using your blog to communicate with customers. The real gist of the question was is not activating the comments feature necessarily a bad thing?

A blog is never a bad thing if your business has a need for reaching out to customers in other venue. If you’re in an industry with a lot of debate, have a business that continually has product updates, or you need a forum for reaching out to the community, a blog is a great place to do it. I never cease to be amazed at how Google’s individual development groups handle their blogs. Sometimes they’ll take a few weeks in between entries, but the quality is enough to get me to return several times a week in hopes of an update.

Onto the comments question. If you’re looking to build a community or looking to receive feedback, comments are a must for your blog. When a blog is well written and often visited, the comments section can be a great communication tool, but not all businesses are using their blog for this purpose. Some just wish to provide basic updates to their customers, or use a blog instead of e-mail marketing tools to reach out to customers, and for these businesses, comments might just not be in the cards. Not having comments activated on your blog is NOT a sign that you’re unwilling to communicate or facilitate conversation, turning off your comments when it’s convenient, or over-moderating them is.

The biggest fear that many businesses have with opening up their blog to comments is the same that they have with online reviews: what if something says something bad? The initial gut-reaction is to shut down comments, or delete them. This just serves to antagonize customers, can make them more irate, and injure your online reputation further.

Again, as with reviews, if you’re a good business, these negative comments will be few and far between. Remember, these comments are on your blog, and you have a place to respond to it, and that is sometimes just as valuable as a positive review or comment. In addition, much like a review, the blog comments is another place for your loyal customers to come to your rescue and provide positive feedback, and helpful information to improve your business.

The biggest recommendation I can give in regard to comments is have a policy and be consistent. Have a plan in place for moderating and responding to comments, and do not bend the rules when it is convenient for you. This can go a long way in building trust with your customer community.

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Improving Customer Service with RatePoint

Using RatePoint to collect, manage and display feedback is not only a good way to promote that you’re a quality business to other consumers, it’s a great tool to help you improve customer service within your own business.

Whenever you receive an authenticated negative review through RatePoint, we start a “dispute resolution process” that allows you to reach out to the consumer and help you resolve the issue. This process is not about “winning or losing” it’s about listening, problem solving, and customer satisfaction.

When dealing with customer service issues, many people forget about the “listening” portion and immediately jump to the final two steps. It’s during this portion of the process that you can learn a lot about where you can improve and start to identify potential issues within your own business.

Keep these following tips in mind when dealing with disputes:

• Be prompt and polite.
• Never assume that the customer is wrong.
• Never attack the customer or treat them disrespectfully.
• Ask questions that can help you learn about your business and understand the customer’s concerns.
  • What is your order number?
  • When did you purchase the order?
  • Did you speak to anyone?
• Even if you believe the customer is wrong, try to learn more information to help you determine why the customer thinks they’re right. Perhaps there was a miscommunication or they were accidentally mislead.

Regardless of the outcome, you should make sure the customer feels like they’ve been treated fairly and respectfully. Even if you don’t totally resolve the customer’s issue entirely, you will leave a good impression on them that could keep them coming back.

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Development Updates

Just wanted to give everyone the heads up that we pushed out some tweaks and fixes to the testimonial pages and spotlight widgets over the last couple of days. A new style of review spotlight widget is available that features a more “tabbed” styling, and the testimonials are a bit happier in pages that use CSS.

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Communicate with your customers, or lose them.

As fans of the WHIR, we were pleased to see them write about the results of a recent study conducted by 1 & 1 Internet. The study bluntly stated some facts that are very obvious to many seasoned online business owners, but are easily overlooked by new companies, or businesses who are just getting started on the Internet.

The highlight of 1&1’s study concludes that “77 percent of consumers switch to competitors if a business website does not provide communication methods.”

This is stark reminder for businesses, that just placing content and a shopping cart on the web is not enough for your customers. We all know automated sales and support tools are convenient, but they are a supplement, not a replacement for these roles. Credible businesses not only provide a way for customers to communicate with them, they provide multiple ways.

Consumers may immediately disregard your business or question its credibility if you don’t have basic contact information such as a physical mailing address, a phone number that rings to a live person and an e-mail address. 1&1 studies showed that 91% of consumers became irritated when they could not find a phone number, and 82% when they could not find an e-mail address.

Consumers will look more favorably on your business if you provide additional communication resources such as the customer feedback tools and seals included in your RatePoint membership, chat or instant messenger capability, even a link to a VOIP enabled program such as Skype.

Remember, if you try to make yourself hidden, your customers will do the same. Be transparent, open and available for your customers and reap the benefits.

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RatePoint Powered Testimonial Pages!

Ask yourself this question: When was the last time you updated your testimonials page? We wouldn’t be surprised if you said “I can’t remember.” Testimonial pages are typically difficult for businesses to manage and often become the black sheep of a website. They provide less value for consumers because the testimonials aren’t authenticated, and even worse they sometimes look fake or written by the business themselves, making a business appear LESS credible to consumers who are becoming more saavy.

With today’s development release, we’re introducing a new feature that provides RatePoint members with a “RatePoint Powered” testimonial page that looks to help businesses solve all of these problems and then some. In your Business Center, you can build a customized testimonial page that you can use to replace your old testimonials page or add a new one to your site. You create a page on your website, we’ll provide you the code to drop in there, and voila, you’ve got an easy to manage, authentic testimonials page.

The testimonials on these pages are pulled directly from the positive reviews you’ve chosen to show on your RatePoint account. In addition, your potential customers can look deeper into your RatePoint profile, and your current customers can provide feedback, all from this page. Because your reviews are collected and authenticated by RatePoint, and not written by the webmaster, your consumers will have greater trust in your testimonials and your reviews.

Here’s an example of the testimonial system at work. This box can be customized and then dropped into pretty much any HTML page:

As we mentioned, this is just the first release of this new feature. Your comments and suggestions are greatly appreciated!

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The Review Spotlight “Widget”

As of today, RatePoint members have access to our Review Spotlight “Widget.” For those of you who are saying to yourself , “what the heck is a widget” as always Wikipedia has the answer, but it just makes things more confusing.

To keep it simple, our Review Spotight Widget will allow you to create custom code for your website that displays reviews directly on your website. These widgets can display up to three reviews at a time, with optional rotation. In addition, we’ve worked in several color schemes, width options, and even rounded and square versions of the widget. Be sure to login to your Business Center account, check it out, and add one to your website today.

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