RatePoint

RatePoint’s Enterprise Feedback Management Released

At the Internet Retailer Conference in Chicago on Tuesday, RatePoint officially announced RatePoint Enterprise. RatePoint’s Enterprise Feedback Management platform provides growing businesses the customer feedback tools needed to effectively implement RatePoint across large organizations.

RatePoint Enterprise Features Include:

• Enhanced user administration capabilities. Create administrators, multiple users and delegate responsibility for feedback.
• Support for multiple business units. If you have large departments, multiple locations, or outlets, you can place them under one umbrella. Great for large organizations and franchises.
• Advanced reporting tools to track multiple categories and units.
• RatePoint Enterprise customers also receive additional e-mail marketing quotas, allowing you to connect with your growing customer base and proactively collect customer feedback.

RatePoint Enterprise is now available for current members as an upgrade through the Business Center, and for new customers here. Pricing starts as low as $49.95/mo.

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RatePoint at the Internet Retailer Conference & Exhibition 2008

The RatePoint Team will be attending the Internet Retailer Conference & Exhibition 2008 (IRCE 2008) next week in Chicago at McCormick Place West. If you’re attending, be sure to drop by booth #145 and stop by for a demo or to introduce yourself. We’ve got some totally sweet pens and you could win a $1,000 flight voucher. We hope to see you there!

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New Email Marketing Tools and Enhancements

We’re pleased to announce that several new e-mail marketing tools and enhancements have been added to your RatePoint Business Center throughout the week.

The RatePoint Address Book has now been enhanced in several ways. First, the user interface is much cleaner and easier for you to use, allowing you to organize your contacts much more effectively. We’ve added group functionality into the address book, which allows you to add contacts to multiple mailing lists. For example you may have a newsletters group and a promotions group that you divide contacts into for different purposes.

We’ve also enhanced the contact import features of the address book which will now accept any standard CSV file. Once you’ve imported your e-mail addresses, you’ll be able to map the appropriate fields in the address book and be set to send e-mails.

Per popular request,  an e-mail subscription widget is now available that allows you to collect e-mail addresses directly from your website. Once collected the e-mails are added directly into your RatePoint address book. Once in the address book you can use our e-mail marketing services to send review requests, newsletters, promotions, or whatever your heart desires. The widget is customizable allowing you to set the color, title text, and the group that you would like to add the e-mails to in your address book.

We hope you enjoy the latest additions to your RatePoint membership and as always your comments are appreciated!

Posted in Development, Features, News | No Comments »

11 Easy Ways to Get Negative Reviews.

Over the past year at RatePoint, we have noticed some common issues that lead to a business getting to a negative review. Fortunately our dispute resolution system helps resolve these, but in an ideal world, we’d like to see businesses strive to reduce the number of negative reviews down to nothing if possible.

Business owners act flabbergasted when they receive a negative review regarding their business. Some of them immediately enter a state resembling the  five-stages of grief, complete with denial and anger, getting all the way down to acceptance. What they don’t understand is many times they bring these negative reviews upon themselves.

Below are eleven common ways to get negative reviews for your business. If you find yourself noticing that your business or employees do any of these things, you could be setting yourself up for trouble!

1. You don’t proactively ask for reviews. When you ask for reviews, they’ll generally be positive, and if there’s an issue, you’ll nail it before it becomes worthy of a negative review. A sign or note posted somewhere is not enough, you much reach out multiple ways including verbally and through e-mail. RatePoint’s Review Request Tool (or simple e-mail tool) is an easy way to accomplish this.
2. You argue with customers. Strong arming a customer or telling them “they’re wrong” will not only guarantee they won’t purchase from you again, it’ll guarantee they’ll be on a mission to make sure everyone knows about it. This can also be defined as “being a jerk.”
3. You’re not courteous. If you treat customers indifferently or as a number, they may see it as a sign of disrespect. Customers have a hard time being mad at someone who is always nice.
4. Promoting products that you don’t have in stock. This is self-explanatory, why are you selling something you don’t have? This happens often to small businesses that don’t have great online-inventory updates.
5. Not quickly alerting a customer to an issue with an order. This is a solid follow-up to #4. With express shipping, people expect to receive an order placed online within a couple of days. Receiving an e-mail a week later that the product is back-ordered probably not only ruined someone’s day, but somebody’s birthday as well. Giving your customer an opportunity to find a different product on your site or elsewhere will save you a customer and a negative review.
6. Confusing policies. Keep it simple. Complex policies can only lead to mis-communication, especially in regards to shipping and refunds. A good policy is one that makes things run smoothly for the business and is fair to the customers. Many business owners ignore the latter, creating policies that make it difficult on the consumer.
7. Ignoring e-mails and phone calls. One good way to get a negative review is to keep ducking the customer. Not only are you missing an opportunity to fix a problem, you’re looking shadier by the minute. For large companies, add “long on-hold time” to this. The problem will not just “go away.”
8. Not being organized. Call it “unintentional ignoring” but if you’re a small business owner, and you’re not organized, stuff ends up slipping through the cracks. Perhaps using Hotmail for your 2,000 e-mails wasn’t the best way to ensure every customer support request was answered.
9. Inconsistency. Do your hours change constantly? Even worse is your business not open when it should be? Does your business run better at different times of the year? When you build customer expectations and don’t meet them, you can expect a negative review.
10. You contact customers in an untimely manner. If there is a problem throughout your business, you should reach-out and explain it as quickly and simply as possible so that you tell them about the problem before they find out on their own. Also, asking for a review or feedback over a year after the fact is guaranteed to hit you with negatives because they’re likely more passionate about their experience.
11. You treat customers differently after they’ve made a purchase. The worse case scenario here is that once someone has paid, you ignore them. Paying customers aren’t necessarily customers for life, in fact they may be more negative in a review because of your change in heart. This especially applies to businesses where you have a monthly payment.

If you find yourself doing several of these things, consider taking a step back and identifying the underlying causes of these issues within your business. By fixing these issues, not only will your customers be more satsified, you’ll retain them, and ultimately boost sales.

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Customer Feedback Data in the New RatePoint Dashboard

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

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!

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RatePoint Feature Update

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!

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Free Marketing and Business Webinars for RatePoint Members

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!

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Small Business Anxiety Over Alexa

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.

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Successful Small Businesses Don’t Grandstand.

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.

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