Do you still remember about our previous doubts on TrustedCompany’s reviews? Well, couple of days ago, the company finally gave us its clarification in regard to our questions. By the clarification, Frederik Krass, TrustedCompany’s Co-Founder and Managing Director, emphasized that his TrustedCompany is a credible and prominent e-commerce review platform.
In our previous article, we described a number of points which became the root of our mistrust towards the platform. Frederik, in advance, clarified each of those doubts in an convincing way, assuring us that the company regards customers’ security at all cost.
In his clarification, Frederik stated that TrustedCompany puts openness and transparency in the first place, declaring that ‘openness is the only way to customers’ trust’. “We strongly believe, that reviews can only add value in the long-run if they are collected on a trustworthy 3rd party platform, thus our highest target is to remain this trustworthy source. One of the strongest pillars for trustworthiness is openness and transparency. TrustedCompany is an open review platform that anyone can contribute to. In our view, an open approach is the only way how you can win consumers’ trust in the long-run, as it allows everyone to get a good picture of the reality for themselves,” he stated.
He also gave his responses to ease our doubts in regard to the existence of “fake” reviews at the platform. He stated that it is the risks of an open platform to have such thing, as they couldn’t systematically predict the coming reviews. However, he and his team have worked day and night to reduce the number of those fake reviews by utilizing a number of methods, including algorithm computation, spam reportage, and social media verification.
Although he admitted that he couldn’t fully protect his platform from the invasion of fake reviews, he was optimistic that the indicators he and his team have set would reduce the number of those type of reviews. He even signaled that, in the future, social verification (via Facebook) would be the platform’s only way to determine whether a review is credible or not.
“It is also really important to understand, that most reviews are generated through review invitations. With TrustedCompany.com we want to find the truth and picture the real customer experience with good and bad reviews, thus we believe in an open platform, that online businesses can invite all their users to, so both satisfied and dissatisfied customers write about their experiences, leaving an authentic picture. These reviews are verified and transaction based,” he added.
When it came to our next doubt, which was about the verification of order ID that the platform holds (as being stated on its FAQ page), Frederik briefly responded that it was only a matter of linguistics misunderstanding. He underlined that on the page, it is clearly stated that the verification of order ID may be necessary only if the e-commerce merchants ask customers to include such thing in their review. This is to reduce and even avoid the existence of any harming reviews.
Well, doubts about fake reviews, check. On order ID, check. What about the dubious ranking system?
Frederik responded the questions about his platform’s ranking system by saying that it is the TrustedCompany’s TrustScore that becomes the root of its ranking system. This TrustScore system gives every company a score of 3,5 at first, which is regarded as neutral. This score would stick to the company until the number of reviews has reached a certain minimum standard. Once it does, the score may fluctuate, whether it would rise up or fall down, depends on the type of the majority of reviews. This is to avoid the possibility of having the score changed only because of one single good or bad review.
“So, companies which engage with their clients on this matter and activate their clients to leave reviews, will have a bigger review base. If you do not ask your all your clients to write a review, your happy and satisfied clients will be less likely to write about your service, you will mainly have dissatisfied people, who are actively looking for a platform to complain, leaving you with a negatively distorted picture. Again, this is independent of how well known a company is or not, but solely based on who can engage their clients to leave a review,” he emphasized.
This long yet complete explanation from Frederik may reflect that TrustedCompany is actually seriously developed to really protect e-commerce consumers from the probability of getting trapped in an online fraud. Such noble intention has attracted three global investors to award the platform with a Series A funding.
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