These days, user-generated content (UGC) is a requirement for online retailers and shoppers in the form of user-submitted reviews. Consumers will often go online in search of reviews before booking a hotel room or making a purchase.
RatePoint, Inc., a provider of customer-feedback and online-reputation management services, offers an affordable solution to manage online business reputations and customer communications.
The RatePoint Service is a suite of tools that a business can use to help build a positive online reputation. The solution includes e-mail marketing and survey tools, and dispute-resolution capabilities for customer retention. The company most recently announced the addition of product reviews to its service. You can access all RatePoint tools through a Web-based admin dashboard.
RatePoint Inc.’s Co-Founder and CEO, Neal Creighton, believes that a business needs to take a pro-active approach to managing its online reputation, and when you offer reviews on your site you can maintain an active conversation with customers.
Business Reputation Reviews
RatePoint’s platform can help you manage two types of reviews. The first is a service review where customer’s rate a company’s service, such as a hotel or landscaper, and provide a testimonial.
 RatePoint's dashboard provides instant access to your account data, plus you can manage new reviews and disputes from one screen.
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Using RatePoint e-mail and survey tools, you can contact your customers after a transaction — or provide a URL in printed literature — and ask them to rate your service. Businesses have a number of ways to show the reviews. For example, the review can be displayed in a customizable widget on your Web site.
After setting up an account with RatePoint, incorporating business-reputation reviews to your site is as easy as copying and pasting the widget code to your pages and then encouraging customers to submit a review after using your services.
Easy Product Reviews
The second type of review — and this is a new service to the RatePoint Suite—is a product review. Product reviews are used on shopping sites and give customers an opportunity to rate and comment on products they have purchased, right on the product page. Other consumers can read these when making a purchase decision.
Chris Nylen, founder of OrganizeIt.com, believes that consumers expect to see product reviews when they shop online. He says that retailers lose sales when they don’t offer them.
The biggest problem for OrganizeIt.com was justifying the cost of offering product reviews. According to Nylen, they were not happy with the pricing of their previous provider, so when RatePoint announced a beta of its new product reviews, OrganizeIt.com joined to test the service.
Nylen reported that OrganizeIt.com had no problems with incorporating RatePoint product reviews into their retail site, and they are pleased with the results and the pricing.
Adding RatePoint-hosted product reviews to your Web site is not a difficult technical process. After signing up for a RatePoint account, you upload your product list to RatePoint to get started. If you don’t have a list, RatePoint can help you build one. Retailers then customize how the reviews will look on their product pages using the RatePoint Review editor tool.
When you’re happy with how the product review will be displayed, it’s as easy as adding the RatePoint Product Review HTML on your site.
Encourage Customers to Post Reviews
Once you have RatePoint’s solution in place for collecting, monitoring and displaying user reviews, Creighton said that getting customers to leave reviews is easy. “Today, consumers are used to contributing user-generated content, and for the most part all a business needs to do is just ask for the review,” he said.
When a transaction has been completed, Creighton recommends that a business contact customers and invite them to review the product or service online. He added that customers will frequently post a review based only on an invitation to do so, and you don’t have to offer discounts or incentives to get those reviews.
“By offering the opportunity for a customer to rate your products, you are empowering that customer and making them feel like a part of the process,” said Creighton. “That is often enough of an incentive.”
Turning a Negative into a Positive
When people post negative reviews about your products or service on Web sites other than yours, there’s not much you can do about it. But the RatePoint Suite includes tools to handle negative comments on your own site. The system queues a negative review, which gives you the opportunity to resolve the problem first. Of course, if you don’t address the issue, you’ll get the negative review…and you’ll probably deserve it.
According to Creighton, 90 percent of all negative reviews turn into a positive when the business responds to the customer. Fixing the problem will also help you to retain that customer. In a case where the customer is unwilling to go through the dispute resolution process, the business can post a management response, allowing other customers to read how the business tried to resolve the problem.
Pricing and Availability
The standard Rate Point package costs $17.95 per month, and it’s suitable for a small business with a contact list of up to 1,000 customer emails. It includes RatePoint’s customer feedback tools and e-mail marketing and surveys. RatePoint also offers 5,000 product reviews free with any package.
Additional packages range from $29.95 per month for up to 5,000 contacts and $99.95 for up to 25,000 contacts. Businesses with a larger product catalog and that need more than 5,000 product reviews can purchase additional product reviews, starting at $9.95 per month for up to 100,000. RatePoint also offers businesses a free 30-day trial.
Vangie Beal is a veteran online seller and frequent contributor to ECommerce-Guide.com. She is also managing editor of Webopedia.com. You can tweet with her online @AuroraGG.
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