Reviews of U.S. Water­proof­ing Now Avail­able on Chica­go BBB Website

Sep 18, 2014 • By Matthew Stock.

As a busi­nessper­son, I have always been con­cerned that cus­tomers get the best infor­ma­tion avail­able about my com­pa­ny to assist them in decid­ing if they want to hire us.

Of course, we pro­vide a lot of infor­ma­tion for con­sumers with our adver­tis­ing, our web­site and this blog. How­ev­er, I think cus­tomers should seek out a third-par­ty opin­ion when mak­ing a choice, not only of base­ment water­proof­ing com­pa­nies, but of any ser­vice they need to engage.

There are many third-par­ty sources avail­able but I have long believed that one of the best is the Bet­ter Busi­ness Bureau.

The Bet­ter Busi­ness Bureau was found­ed in 1912 to help con­sumers report and seek help with dis­hon­est, unfair or just plain bad busi­ness prac­tices. The BBB con­sists of 112 inde­pen­dent­ly orga­nized local Bureaus through­out the Unit­ed States and Cana­da that are coor­di­nat­ed by the Coun­cil of BBBs locat­ed in Virginia.

The BBB has a long-estab­lished sys­tem of rat­ing busi­ness based on respons­es to cus­tomer com­plaints, among oth­er things. Recent­ly, the BBB has been test­ing an addi­tion to this ser­vice: direct con­sumer reviews as a way to let con­sumers ben­e­fit from the expe­ri­ence of others.

Chica­go BBB Now Fea­tures Reviews of U.S. Waterproofing

I am very pleased that the Bet­ter Busi­ness Bureau of Chica­go and North­ern Illi­nois has recent­ly approved the addi­tion of con­sumer reviews to its website.

Pres­i­dent Steve J. Bernas explains in a recent arti­cle on the BBB web­site: ​“The new Cus­tomer Review fea­ture has been in devel­op­ment and test­ing for over one year by sev­er­al BBBs around the coun­try. Their expe­ri­ences will help our BBB inte­grate your customer’s com­ments into the Busi­ness Review pages.
​“The ratio­nale for this new fea­ture is based on the fact that peo­ple like to know what oth­er people’s opin­ions are. Cus­tomer com­ments have become expect­ed sec­tions on most web­sites that serve the buy­ing pub­lic. Many com­merce web­sites have sec­tions that allow cus­tomers to rate prod­ucts and services.”

Bernas adds, ​“Because the BBB is focused on being a pri­ma­ry provider of infor­ma­tion about good, eth­i­cal busi­ness, our inclu­sion of cus­tomer com­ments is a nat­ur­al pro­gres­sion of what peo­ple now expect for an online ser­vice and rat­ing provider.”

The BBB will review cus­tomer com­ments in the rat­ing for pri­va­cy con­cerns and inap­pro­pri­ate lan­guage. The reviewed busi­ness will have the oppor­tu­ni­ty to respond to the com­ments, as is done in oth­er online rat­ings services.

Third par­ty com­men­tary on reviews will not be allowed.

In order to give read­ers a snap­shot of oth­er cus­tomers’ expe­ri­ence with the reviewed busi­ness, a review­ing cus­tomer will con­tribute to a pie chart on each busi­ness by respond­ing to two questions:

Char­ac­ter­ize your cus­tomer expe­ri­ence with this busi­ness: Pos­i­tive, Neu­tral or Negative

And,

Would you rec­om­mend this busi­ness to a friend? Like­ly, Unde­cid­ed or Unlikely.

Review­ing cus­tomers will be able to write about their expe­ri­ence with a busi­ness and rate the busi­ness to a scale of 1 – 10. All of this input will be used to gen­er­ate a ​“star rat­ing” for the busi­ness on a scale of 1 – 5.

“We believe,” adds Bernas, ​“the com­bi­na­tion of val­i­dat­ed Cus­tomer Reviews and the exist­ing curat­ed let­ter-grade rat­ing sys­tem pro­vides cus­tomers the most pow­er­ful busi­ness eval­u­a­tion method available.”

Chica­go BBB Rat­ings Based on Nation­al System

In 2013, the Coun­cil of Bet­ter Busi­ness Bureaus adopt­ed pol­i­cy allow­ing cus­tomer reviews on BBB sites. The Coun­cil set forth the fol­low­ing qual­i­fi­ca­tions to accept con­sumer reviews:

• The reviewer’s name, email and ZIP code must be included;
• If the BBB has no record of the com­pa­ny, the review­er must sup­ply suf­fi­cient infor­ma­tion to locate it;
• The review­er must have had a ​“mar­ket­place inter­ac­tion” with the company;
• The review must relate to the mar­ket­place inter­ac­tion by com­ment­ing on goods or ser­vices pro­vid­ed or offered; and.
• The review­er has not filed a com­plaint or writ­ten a pre­vi­ous review about the same busi­ness regard­ing the same interaction.

The BBB will decline to include a review for only two reasons:

• If the review includes inap­pro­pri­ate lan­guage or per­son­al infor­ma­tion to the extent that edit­ing it out would change the sub­stance of the review; or,
• If the review is unin­tel­li­gi­ble or incom­plete. The BBB will give the cus­tomer an oppor­tu­ni­ty to pro­vide the miss­ing infor­ma­tion before reject­ing the review.

Of course, the BBB does col­lect mem­ber­ship fees from com­pa­nies but it does not sell adver­tis­ing so there is no pres­sure on busi­ness­es to adver­tise to ​“improve” their rep­u­ta­tions on the BBB site.

I’d like to com­pare the BBB’s new review sys­tem with the oth­er third-par­ty source of con­sumer infor­ma­tion that I admire, Angie’s List. Angie’s List also pub­lish­es con­sumer reviews and rates busi­ness­es based on a num­ber of legit­i­mate cri­te­ria. It is, how­ev­er, a fee-based ser­vice and even though the cost is rea­son­able, access is lim­it­ed to those who enroll and pay. Cus­tomer reviews, as well as com­pa­ny rat­ings and infor­ma­tion, are free to all con­sumers on the BBB website.

Then there’s that oth­er no-cost source of cus­tomer reviews, Yelp. We’ve writ­ten about Yelp sev­er­al times in this blog so I won’t rehash it here but between Yelp’s ques­tion­able prac­tice of con­ceal­ing some reviews in favor of oth­ers and their recent very pub­lic dif­fi­cul­ties, I am dou­bly glad that Chica­go con­sumers now have the BBB as a source of unbi­ased cus­tomer opinion.

So, we wel­come the new review sys­tem from the BBB and look for­ward to hav­ing our cus­tomers make use of it. As of this writ­ing our first review has yet to appear but we believe it will prove a use­ful tool for con­sumers and busi­ness­es alike.

Of course, the BBB will con­tin­ue its sys­tem of rat­ing busi­ness­es with a let­ter grade based on such fac­tors as the company’s his­to­ry in busi­ness and its response to and res­o­lu­tion of com­plaints. Con­sumers who are unable to resolve an issue with a mem­ber busi­ness may still file a com­plaint with the Bet­ter Busi­ness Bureau and the BBB will do its best to make sure the prob­lem is resolved.

At U.S. Water­proof­ing, we are proud of our long affil­i­a­tion with the BBB as we are of our Accred­it­ed sta­tus and ​“A+” rat­ing. We are espe­cial­ly proud of the fact that we received the Chica­go BBB’s Torch Award for mar­ket­place ethics in 2006. We believe that the BBB is an effec­tive rep­re­sen­ta­tive of busi­ness­es and advo­cate for con­sumers and rec­om­mend that any prospec­tive cus­tomer, whether con­sid­er­ing us or one of our com­peti­tors, include the BBB in their research.

Our com­pa­ny has been in busi­ness for 57 years and in that time has become one of the nation’s largest and most suc­cess­ful base­ment water­proof­ing and foun­da­tion repair com­pa­nies in the U.S. We got there by doing right by our cus­tomers and we have more than 300,000 of them who are hap­py with our work.

Tags: u.s. waterproofing reviews, u.s. waterproofing better business bureau, chicago better business bureau

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