RatePoint

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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React Fast.

This might seem like common sense to most businesses, but reacting fast to your customer’s needs can go a long way into improving customer satisfaction. One great benefit of RatePoint is that when you receive a negative review, you have the opportunity to respond to that review and hopefully resolve any issues with that customer.

As you might expect, those businesses that respond to these negative reviews quickly tend to resolve the issue and satisfy their customers, or at the least engage in some helpful conversation where they can learn more about the issue. Those that don’t respond quickly either irritate their customers further, by justifying their negative review, or totally forget about the issue, a total loss.

Whenever there’s a customer service issue, strike quick, before they strike back!

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Survey Tools, Address Book Released

We’re pleased to announce that we’ve released new survey and address book functionality into the RatePoint Business Center! If you’re a business owner looking to get some in-depth feedback from your customers these tools are a good place to start.

Our address book will let you enter your customer e-mails into our system manually, as well as import contacts from Outlook, GMail, Yahoo! and MSN so you can get started quickly.

Once your address book is set-up you can use our new survey tools to create your own customized survey and send it out to groups of your customers. In addition, you can also use these tools to send out review requests to some of your past customers, a great way to start collecting feedback and reach out to customers who you haven’t touched in some time.

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RatePoint Company Blog

In effort to keep you informed better informed about the latest enhancements to RatePoint, we’ve relaunched our company blog. This is the place we’ll update you about new features and releases, discuss interesting happenings in the world of business, customer feedback and online reputation management, and anything else that crosses our mind. Feel free to join us in the discussion and be part of our community!

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