Devon Blog

Tag: trustengine

  • Why should anyone use trustENGINE when so many other review platforms already exist?

    We created trustENGINE because every business whether big or small that registers with us gets unbiased reviews. The foundation principles of trustENGINE are the following –

    • Reduce fake reviews
    • Help proliferate the truth
    • Accelerate the opportunity to receive feedback & improve
    • A single venue for consumers to interact with the business
    • Promote reviews from verified transactions
    • Build trust through transparency

    See here why we created trustENGINE and how we are innovating to make trusted reviews a reality. Many review platforms already exist in the market but they all have a few gaps which cause significant challenges for consumers & for businesses too

    + Many online review platforms have a pay to play business model

    Businesses that pay can get preferential treatment. This monetization strategy may be good for the review platform provider but is harmful for the consumer. trustENGINE works on a common set of guidelines that promote transparency & fairness to all users & businesses alike

    + Fake reviews can proliferate on public platforms

    Fake reviews are common on the online platform. They are either negative or positive. Some organisations, to promote their own products and business even hire people to write fake reviews and cause harm to their competitors. Customers rely on reviews to buy products and services. But these reviews sometimes can create problems for consumers and small business.

    + Businesses must have an opportunity to challenge suspect reviews and ask for transaction verification

    Businesses can be vulnerable to frauds. Customers to get something in return or to defame the company write fake reviews about the product they sell. You can reduce the risk of negative reviews by addressing them in a positive way and fix it.  This risk can be reduced by asking the customers for their verified contact details, transaction ids or some proof of purchase of the goods or services brought from them.

    + Most platforms cater to large or online companies

    trustENGINE is designed to help the small business owner build their brand and to build awareness with customers. By enabling small business owners to collect reviews online or in-store, we’re focusing on helping consumers discover that amazing business that is within their community or neighborhood.

    + Consumers have a hard time knowing the businesses actual rating based on verified transactions

    On trustENGINE any consumer can provide a review for any business. We clearly highlight whether a review is based on a verified transaction or not. Every reviewer must confirm their contact information before they can write a review on trustENGINE. This ensures that a review received can lead to a conversation between the business and the reviewer and provides the business owner an opportunity to make good on the customers experience.

    In summary, trustENGINE works on transparency & fairness to all users & businesses alike. Curbs and flags online fake reviews. Enabling small business owners to collect reviews and focusing on helping them and the consumers to discover businesses in their neighbourhood.

  • How do I know trustENGINE is an unbiased platform for customer reviews?

    trustENGINE’s mission is to bring customers and companies together by taking a fair, impartial and equal stance towards reviews. Every business has to follow the same rules, maybe free or the ones who have subscribed to our services.

    We are committed to be fair to all business and our customers consistently and build trust through the act of honesty.

    + On trustENGINE reviews can never be deleted or hidden by the business owner.

    Once the customers had created their account and verified it on trustEngine, when they write reviews they are the sole owners and only they are the who can edit or delete their reviews. We keep reviews of verified customers as long as they are users of trustEngine.

    + ‘Incentivized reviews’ are always tagged. We put transparency first.

    Many times businesses offer incentives like, discount coupons, free stuff, or even receiving a product before its launched to motivate their customers to give feedback and write reviews. In return it helps businesses to attract more customers and increase their profits because of repeat business.

    When we come across such customers and their reviews we tag it as an ‘incentivized review’

    + ‘Verified transactions’ are promoted.

    A transaction takes place when a customer has purchased the product online or in store. When a customer wants to write a review on the trustEngine platform, they need to create their account. To write a review about the product they have purchased from a business, some proof of purchase is required to verify the transaction. Once that is done, the review is tagged as a verified transaction review.

    + Reviewers must have a verified contact information before they can write a review

    We require reviewers to allow us to save their IP address and location when they are writing a review. This enables us to correlate the users location to the business location and flag any reviews that seem suspect.

    + We are constantly at work to block or mitigate fake reviews

    Fake reviews both positive and negative about a product can harm the business as they sometimes have a positive impact on the customer buying decision. Some businesses, to promote their own products and business even hire people to write fake reviews and cause harm to their competitors. Fortunately our platform helps prevent this by a verifying process compulsory for all the users who want to write reviews on trustEngine.

    It is mandatory, the reviewer loads proof of transaction done with the business, if not they cannot post their reviews on the site.

    On the other hand our technical team constantly is developing and is improving the tools required to fight suspicious and fake reviews.

  • What are the best practices to follow when writing a review for a business or product

    Your reviews matter to both – other shoppers and to the businesses you are reviewing. Reviews provide an opportunity for businesses and customers to build a relationship with one another. And an natural guide for new customers who may be looking to determine if a service or product will meet their needs.

    When you post a review on trustENGINE (or anywhere for that matter), your review should be as clear as possible about what you liked and did not like about the service or product you received from the specific business.

    By doing so businesses understand what they do well and where they need to do better. Most businesses views reviews are a key source of information for creating better experiences for everyone. Here are some best practices to follow –

    + Reviews should be short and clear

    Be specific about what and how you write about the product. Limiting your feedback content to your specific experience is very important. Where possible (always give the business a way to identify your interaction through either a transaction ID, receipt number or other means). Being clear and effective in your reviews gives others the opportunity to understand and take decisions to buy and also builds trust between the business and buyer. If you are a frequent user of the business, you may go back to provide feedback more than once as long as every review is backed by a specific verifiable interaction or event.

    + Be courteous, polite and friendly

    When you encounter an issue, providing feedback is the best way to help the business remediate the problem. It is the quickest and easiest way to ensure others know of your experience and openly allow the business to respond and address the situation.

    Its important to be polite when writing reviews even if your experience was negative. The intent is for transparent communication and how the business owner conducts themselves (whether they care or not) will become evident through how they respond to your reviews. Transparency improves relationships and offers fertile ground to build trust. Patience and mutual respect are best ways to solve even the most difficult situations easily.

    + Write only if you have had a verifiable interaction

    Giving genuine reviews is very important. Therefore it is necessary, only give your feedback when you have had a direct experience. Do not write just because someone has shared their experience with you. Every negative review, can affect the overall rating of a business. To ensure that fake reviews do not hamper the reputation of a genuine business, at trustENGINE we encourage verified transaction reviews. The goal is always to ensure full transparency from each side – reviewer & the business both.

    + Finally, read through your review once before posting so you know it reflects what you feel

    Before you post your reviews, proofread and thoroughly check to ensure it says what you are meaning to say. Always follow the community guidelines. Reviews can be flagged or even removed for policy violations. However, trustENGINE will always take an unbiased position and shall never hide or remove a review simply based on request from a business owner.

  • trustENGINE ratings – How do these work?

    trustENGINE’s mission is to disseminate real reviews from real customers with 100% transparency. Our goal is to help genuine businesses get discovered by customers.

    See why we created trustENGINE?

    Like any reviews & ratings platform trustENGINE allows consumers to rate products, services & businesses on the basis of their real experiences and genuine interactions.

    The trustENGINE ratings are a composite star rating that each business scores as a result of the reviews consumers provide to the business. However there are a few nuances –

    1. Not only does trustENGINE provide an overall 1-5 star rating for the business bassed on all its reviews but we also provide a overall star rating based on all the reviews that are based on ‘verified transactions’ with the business. A verified transaction based rating provides greater confidence in the consumer feedback as those are all based on verified experiences with the business.
    2. trustENGINE ratings are weighted in favor of the more recent reviews received by the business. We call this the ‘recency effect’. Because the most recent reviews received by the business are a reflection the experiences recently delivered, the trustENGINE rating is an indicator of ‘what experience you might want to expect’ if you are to patronize the business.
    3. We have a belief that every business aims to do the best it can to serve its customers. On trustENGINE, every business starts off with a 4-star rating and has an opportunity to build its ratings up based on consumer feedback. Until a business has received 25 ratings, we consider that businesses overall trustENGINE rating as ‘yet to be stabilized’. Once 25 ratings have been received, the ‘recency effect’ ensures that the most recent ratings bear greater influence on the overall rating and tend to keep the ratings fresh & relevant at all times.

  • Why did we create trustENGINE?

    1. Why we’re building connectchief…
    2. Every business should build its ecosystem for growth
    3. Why did we create trustENGINE?
    4. Why we are building promoENGINE?
    5. Why are we building flexxWORK?
    6. Why we’re building loyaltyENGINE?

    trustENGINE is an online review platform built by connectchief.

    Our vision with trustENGINE is to provide a neutral ground for customers & businesses to interact where customers can provide genuine feedback on thier overall service experiences with that business.

    Why businesses asked us to build trustENGINE?

    + Reduce fake reviews

    User reviews are a great way for consumers to discover good products, services and businesses. However, the democratic voice that reviews give to users is often exploited by those entering fake reviews. This creates a problem for businesses and users alike. Like in any democracy, you cannot eliminate bad actors but one can surely nullify their effect by having all citizens participate. By having all consumers provide a review, good or bad, the effect of fake reviews can be nullified. trustENGINE provides an unbiased platform for providing and collecting reviews. Our software engines are continuously tuned to flag and capture fake reviews. See more about fake reviews and how you can work with us to reduce fake reviews

    + Help proliferate the truth

    By getting reviews for any business or product in one place, one can provide a true representation of users’s feedback about the product or service

    + Accelerate the opportunity to receive feedback & improve

    User reviews are a great way for small businesses to know what’s working and what the business needs to work on to improve its products and services. trustENGINE has built-in data analytic and reporting tools that empower business owners to prioritize their focus on topics that can help them achieve the highest improvements in customer satisfaction and the best returns for the businesses improvement efforts.

    + A single venue for consumers to interact with the business

    There are quite a few social media platforms on the internet, each designed with the motive to build online social interactions. Most those platforms (Facebook by Meta, Twitter, Instagram, Google offer opportunities for consumers to tag a business and put a message. Because their central focus is on social engagement, these platforms do not focus on addressing the consumers & businesses needs to bring a unified view about the business. As entrepreneurs, we ourselves have faced challenges with fake and uncontrolled reviews, a lack of mediation & moderation controls, reviews being scattered across the internet and very limited analytics to help the business owner distill incoming feedback so they can focus on improving where they need to based on consumer feedback.

    + Promote reviews from verified transactions

    Business owners who were fed up with fake reviews preferred if there is a platform where the user can verify their transaction id at the time of entering reviews. This is a great way to build confidence in the overall reviews and ratings for a business. The larger the quantify of verified transaction reviews, the higher the confidence that the reviews reflect reality.

    + Build trust through transparency

    The goal of our platform is to build trust through transparency. Verified transaction reviews is a great way to ensure that real transactions are mapped to incoming reviews. We further enhanced trustENGINE with engines built in to flag and capture reviews that may be added by business owners to promote their self-interest. In addition, to ensure tranparency both consumers & business owners are required to comply with the trustENGINE guidelines to ensure fair, unbiased and transparent information being provided through reviews on the platform.

    What are the key things trustENGINE brings to the table?

    1. A platform that is open to everyone and focuses exclusively on collecting, managing and showcasing consumer feedback about a business
    2. Consumers can provide feedback on any business – at no cost to them or the business.
    3. A transparent scoring methodology where verified reviewers and verified transactions carry greater weight
    4. Artificially intelligent engines that capture and suppress reviews (with full transparency) that seem ingenuine. Our software is designed to fight fake reviews.
    5. trustENGINE puts transparency and open access to information first. Even if a business has a paid account on trustENGINE, they have no control over which reviews must be deleted.

  • How can businesses curb fake reviews

    Fake reviews are a huge problem for businesses.

    However, how can one stop fake reviews from popping up and misguiding our end users. Fake reviews come from many sources – jealous competitors, disgruntled customers or employees or anyone who may have any reason to benefit from your business not doing well. Fake reviews can misinform customers if not handled properly. However, the right attitude and approach to handling fake reviews can make your business shine out better than it would otherwise.

    We all want our customers to be reading the real reviews about our business, its products & services. And we need to know that fake reviews can be reduced but not avoided completely. So its best to remind all genuine users to provide a review, whether good or bad. Because reviews will help us do better and get our business do better over time. See our post here on why its important to get customers to write reviews about you.

    In our experience – there are a few simple steps that every business must take to curb the fake reviews about your services.

    1. Respond to every review

    When you respond to every review, your customers know you genuinely care. Your response needs to focus on the issue not the reviewer and never come across as defensive. Your goal with reviews needs to be to genuinely listen and learn

    2. Follow a good review moderation practice

    Reviews that seem suspect should be dug into. Ask for more context, information that can help you connect the feedback to a real interaction. Always operate from the premise that the review is not fake and make an earnest attempt to help the customer (thats why every business exists, to serve the customers). Requesting for information on things like the name of the person who the customer interacted with, items that were on the order, approximate date and time of the transaction etc can help you demonstrate to the community how genuinely you are interested in supporting customers as a business. With trustENGINE paid plans our team can help with guided mediations (in certain conditions). Our team on an ongoing basis can even flag reviews, reviewers or businesses that appear to be borderline fake / suspect.

    3. Promote reviews from verified transactions

    Try to tie every one of your reviews to a transaction or an interaction between the customer and your business. This practice of connecting most reviews to a valid interaction is ‘worth its weight in gold’. Verified transaction reviews = actual reflection of interactions with the business. trustENGINE can split business ratings to show your rating from verified transactions vs non-verified transactions. Non-verified transaction ratings carry a lower weight towards your overall rating.

    4. Know that you can reduce but cannot eliminate fake reviews

    Its hard to eliminate fake reviews, so its all the more important to ask all your genuine customers to review their interaction with your business. A best practice is to issue an invoice for every transaction. Each invoice must bear a unique interaction number (invoice number, transaction number, order number or other transaction ID that is relevant to your business) and a message to each user to share a review. trustENGINE is built not just to support online businesses but also brick-and-mortar storefronts. Using trustENGINE + connectchief tools you can encourage your users to provide a review or rate their visit experience from within the storefront itself. Reviews captured from within the storefront also carry information on the location where the review was provided (we capture location but do not display it) and further increase the likelihood of that review being tagged as genuine.

    5. Take an unbiased position when hosting your reviews

    In general, reviews that are self-hosted on your own website are not received well by customers. Customers find it to be less trustworthy when a business has full control over which reviews to display vs not on its website. As the saying goes, you can’t trust the fox to guard the henhouse (meaning Don’t assign a job to someone who will then be in a position to exploit it for his own ends.)

    Reviews are best hosted with a third party platform that has proper processes in place to ensure that reviews are unbiased, cannot be tampered with while there exists an opportunity for the business to make amends and improvements when negative feedback is received. The ultimate goal for a open for everyone reviews platform is to build trust through transparency.

  • Did you know? “Customer reviews are SEO magnets”

    This is follow up to our previous post on “Why is it important to ask your users for a review“

    Search engines are great ways to get customers to discover your business – whether you do business online or offline. Most small businesses with offline / in-store presences tend not to pay as much attention to asking their customers for reviews. Or if they do, they fail to manage the review collection, management & learning from feedback process.

    Customer reviews & feedback are one of the clearest ways to know what you are doing well and where we need to do better as a business. And user reviews & ratings are simply awesome when it comes to SEO for your business.

    • Reviews come from your customers – the reviews contain the kind of keywords that describe your business to them. More importantly, because customers write naturally and write about what they feel, they end up using language that’s similar to what people will search for when those people looking for your product, service or business. Simply put, reviews can improve your websites ranking for those search terms.
    • Reviews contain awesome snippets of text – that can help search engines use text for click-throughs to your website from search pages.
    • Customer Reviews & ratings are regularly updated – Search engines love regularly updated content. These reviews provide exactly the kind of content that search engines are looking for and because they are regularly updated, relevant and unique these help your SEO
    • Customer reviews are the social proof that your first-time consumers need – when they are trying to decide on either purchasing a product, a service or even visiting a business establishment.

    Almost everyone (unless you’ve been sleeping under a rock) today, relies on online searches to find businesses. So even if you do not conduct business online, you as a business owner need to focus your energies on collecting reviews from all your customers. These reviews are amazing tools to get search engines to present your business to customers as a relevant search result.

  • Why is it important to ask your users for a review

    In this technology driven age of online commerce, we all understand the benefit of product or business reviews. Regardless of whether your business is online or offline, you must focus on getting reviews.

    As a buyer –

    • By reading other customer’s review(s), I can make a more informed decision about the product or business
    • We can discover if people similar to us are happy with the product or business
    • Reviews can help us build confidence that we’re making a good decision
    • Reviews can also help alleviate any concerns we might have about the product or business
    • By reading reviews, a buyer can make a more informed decision that can help the user discover things about the product or business that identify better with the buyer.

    As a business owner –

    • Reviews bring credibility to my business. They help you build trust
    • Reviews can help increase sales – because they can naturally support a customer get comfortable around the idea of doing business with you
    • Consumer reviews build an online reputation for you business
    • Customer reviews can help you build up the SEO you need for your online presence.
    • Reviews provide the (neutral) social proof thats required to influence a new customers behavior
    • Reviews help you improve your product or service. Any aspect of your business that is consistently appreciated (or criticized) is a prime item for you to act upon. Do more of what is appreciated and do better about the things that are being criticized.

    trustENGINE by connectchief helps business owners collect unbiased reviews from their customers online or offline.

    Learn more about trustENGINE

  • Why we’re building connectchief…

    1. Why we’re building connectchief…
    2. Every business should build its ecosystem for growth
    3. Why did we create trustENGINE?
    4. Why we are building promoENGINE?
    5. Why are we building flexxWORK?
    6. Why we’re building loyaltyENGINE?

    Every large company was once a small business.

    team connectchief
    • There are an est. 28 million small businesses in the U.S. alone — which outnumber large corporations 1162 to 1.
    • 70% of all small businesses are owned and operated by a single person.
    • Most small businesses employee fewer than 25 employees.

    Running a small business is real hard work.

    We asked ourselves, what do small businesses that grow up to be large businesses do differently?

    Of course, they all get access to large amounts of capital that they invest and grow. But before getting that capital, they all have done a great job to attract new customers, retain existing customers and they keep discovering & offering more “things or services” that those customers need.

    Why are these organizations able to do what they do?

    They are always listening – to customers, to employees, to stakeholders and to anyone that is relevant to their business. Now they don’t necessarily listen to everything everyone has to say. They have an ear on the ground so the can hear what their stakeholders say and then do something about the things that matter.

    What we found

    After meeting with and analyzing the journeys of multiple successful businesses we found that the ones that did well where those who engaged with their customers, paid a lot of attention to what their customers were saying (or signaling through their behavior) and had managed to convert a larger than average amount of their visitors into to loyal users.

    Customers exhibit a very interesting (and obvious) behavior – they tend to go back to businesses where they feel heard. Even if a customer didn’t have a great experience with a business at first, they feel comfortable giving that business a second or third chance if they feel that business heard them and is taking steps to do better the next time.

    As a business owner its very important to listen for signals. And its impossible to listen to anything if you aren’t really trying. However, once you make an effort to listen there is an incredible amount of learning that keeps coming from it. Your customers can show you the way to succeed. Companies that are wildly successful have found various ways to engage with their stakeholders, to listen for feedback and they tend to put in the efforts in making continuous improvements along the way.

    An incredible and very commonly known example of such outward focused behavior is Amazon. Amazon has been known to be laser focused on customers. They started out from being an online bookstore and have evolved into a company that disrupts and leads practically any industry vertical they enter. They’ve achieved this through maniacal customer engagement and an action bias driven by data. All this decision is powered through sophisticated technology and data analysis. However, not everyone can afford to do what the likes of Amazon can achieve. At connectchief, we’re focused on bringing to your business the competitive edge and technologies big business has used to GROW.

    So what does connectchief do?

    We build (software) tools that enable businesses to thrive.

    We identified a few signficant needs for most businesses –
    • Every business needs to build and nurture its ecosystem for long term success …learn more about bizz by connectchief
    • Every business needs to promote itself – most people we spoke with do not make much of a difference between marketing, branding and advertising… learn more about PromoENGINE
    • Gain trust & build a reputation … learn about trustENGINE
    • Loyal customers are the lifeblood of growth businesses. …learn about loyaltyENGINE
    • A lot of internet or technology-driven businesses do not have a store front. They need effective ways to work remotely … learn about flexxWORK
    • Engage your audience – not just customers. Be in front of them. Talk to them. Listen to them… we’ll share some things about hearecho soon!

    We built these by listening to you, our target customers. And we plan to keep building more solutions that help your business grow.