So tone deaf. A PR coup for FeeFighters. A total PR debacle for BBB. FeeFighters could in fact give a fuck about their actual accreditation, so they had nothing to lose. BBB meanwhile looks petty, out of touch, and defensive.
You didn't need to be a chess grandmaster to see how this will play out. You barely even need to see one move ahead. What moron at BBB OK'd this? How incompetent is the rest of their organization?
If the air seems to be more humid today, that's because PR guys everywhere are salivating for how much play they could get with "We investigated the BBB, found shenanigans, and got it explicitly committed to paper that they wanted to crush us for having found shenanigans and talked publicly about them."
"How incompetent is the rest of their organization?"
Really incompetent in the last complaint I filed with them. Just basically threw it out without communicating why. When I called to ask why, no call back. Looks like these guys are on the way down - they used to respond competently and quickly to consumer inputs.
I have serious doubts they even read complaints or responses. Last complaint I made was about my landlord delaying our notice of termination of tenancy (my wife works in legal and had a lawyer make sure it was to the letter of ontario law) and they refused claiming, we had to pay $100 fee - which is illegal under ontario law.
We first wrote the BBB, who resolved the matter when the head office of my landlord responded to us that "we had misunderstood the situation". Regardless of their wording, they require a $100 fee to terminate tenancy.
We decided that letting our tenancy lapse and have the extra 30 days to move. We moved out on the 18th, planned to clean on the next friday like the 26th. We found our landlord had entered our property without permission and allowed contractors in (who trashed the carpet by pouring a gallon of solvent out) and told us they intended to charge us for the damages.
We contacted the BBB again, whilst taking the matter past the local office to the companies legal department. The BBB never even registered our second complaint, stating the matter was already resolved. We got the issue resolved by dealing with their legal department and threatening to haul them in front of small claims court and the landlord and tenancy board (and we had not only an admission of illegal entry on their part, but also photographic evidence over a week of illegal entries), and then one of their lawyers apparently drove down to the local office to yell at the staff.
My impression of the BBB is not good. Here in ontario the threat of the BBB is a lot weaker than threatening the consumer protection act.
This may be one of the main reasons why Consumer Reports is such a well respected institution. They are funded by consumers, so they can be honest in their reviews of products without fear of retaliation.
You didn't need to be a chess grandmaster to see how this will play out.
Yeah, it will all blow over in a week or two because Fee Fighters is relatively small. A few more people will find out how sleazy the BBB is, but not enough to actually impact the BBB.
I think Thomas and I are thinking less "Probability that this will kill the BBB" and more "How many tens of thousands of dollars of PR firm time would produce demonstrably less press hits than this event will."
It's that and the "let's punch ourselves in the face" aspect of taking a story that you want to minimize, and deciding months later when it has completely blown over to send it aloft in a gigantic fusillade of skyrockets and roman candles. "PLEASE, ENTIRE MAINSTREAM MEDIA, PLEASE REVIVE THIS ABSOLUTELY TOXIC STORY. And if you could, could you maybe mix in a David vs. Goliath element to it this time?"
Having been in the room with PR people during (supposed) crises in the past: every single one of them would tell you not to do what BBB just did here.
I think the BBB has already sustained the fatal wound, it will just take a time-frame of decades for it to play out. Their service means nothing to most of the generation that grew up on the internet. Those people tend to utilize several key data points (trusted blogger, Amazon Review, a forum, Yelp, Urbanspoon) to make decisions about businesses and products.
Where those that are rapidly becoming elderly, grew up in a generation that had to rely on these data aggregation and trust business entities. As those people become less and less of a consumer force via attrition, entities like the BBB in their current form will cease to exist. I think they sense it and are selling that last thing that they had (their credibility) in the death throws. All efforts to adapt their model has thus-far failed.
You have no idea how much I would love to! It's a tough problem to solve, but the internet as a whole is getting there with crowdsourced review sites.
I think Google is actually the most poised to solve this problem at the moment, and I'm interested/excited to see how the Trusted Stores thing they announced today http://www.google.com/trustedstores/ plays out. Certainly a step in the right direction.
Given that I can't even get them to update the street address on a client's (successfully claimed) Google Places listing, I have my doubts.
To the extent it allows Google users to interact directly, perhaps. To the extent it demands any (non-development) support from Google staff, "forgetaboutit".
(To clarify, I can sign in and update the listing all I want. It shows correctly on that page. Access the Places listing while not signed in, however, and they are, months later, STILL listed as being at their old address.)
I think roles such as these (i.e. 3rd party ratings) are best left to non-profit entities. Not that there isn't any potential for conflict of interest simply because the org is non-profit, but it seems to minimize the possibility. Also, because non-profits are dependent on donations, there is more interest in transparency and honesty. I'm thinking about something like Charity Navigator.
On the other hand, when your business is corrupt to the point that it was investigated for pay-to-play practices by a third party, well, completely expected.
I don't think anyone at the BBB is thinking about the outcome; rather they're protecting their (stupid) business model.
the funny thing is that initially, we (feefighters) didn't plan this to be an investigation. we just kept hearing stories from our customers about how credit card processors would rip them off, they would complain to the bbb, and nothing would happen. finally, we decided to take a stand.
For anyone on the fence about the claims, 20/20 did an investigation[1] of the BBB and found exactly the same thing. They worked with companies with complaints against them and low ratings that were called by BBB representatives asking them to re-up their registrations.
Without much coaxing the BBB agents clarified that the ratings could be "reinstated" or "take care of" if the signup process was completed. Once the businesses did that, in every case, the scores were re-adjusted to A or A+ for those companies.
Conversely, companies that didn't re-up would have all their past complaints re-instated on their review page and scores drop to C/D/F levels.
Not unlike the Yelp stuff we saw going on last week or the week before here on HN.
I must be an oddball along with everybody I know. The BBB symbol has meant nothing to me and usually rely on other sources to make a decision wether a business is trustworthy or not. IMHO BBB is pretty much irrelevant to the internet generation.
Interesting. I consider the BBB to be an utterly useless organization. Seeing their logo is actually slightly off-putting to me, and if I see it on a site I usually pause to ensure the site is not some tiny operation that is going to be unable to deliver. I don't easily recall ever seeing the BBB logo associated with what I consider a 'real' company online.
That's funny, we threw it out because it had no effect on conversion and wasn't worth the money. The only logo that seemed to have a solid impact was the hacker safe logo, which we kept.
In Canada the BBB logo is often displayed on the biggest rip-off services available.
I'm not kidding. Over time I've learned that when I see the BBB logo I need to be really careful, because scuzzy businesses use it as a cloak. A good example is the "Vancouver Rental Guide" ("Edmonton Rental Guide", etc) which literally sells you the information from craigslist. They cite their BBB credentials over and over to get you to fall for their scam.
You are totally correct, although it depends wildly on who your customer is (IE older people grew up trusting the BBB, younger folks don't care). We had an internal argument about whether doing this was the right thing or not for our business. I did it against the wishes of some other FeeFighters because I believe it's the right thing to do (I HATE scams like these so much), but it did mean that we had to take their symbol off our site and suffer whatever consequences come with that.
When we do focus groups or usability tests with small businesses, they always look at the BBB ratings of the credit card processors on our site. However, I think with our new product Samurai (for online payments - http://samurai.feefighters.com) we'll have a more savvy crowd who doesn't care too much about the BBB.
For those of you who aren't too familiar with FeeFighters - our original product is comparison shopping for credit card processing. A good chunk of our customers are e-commerce businesses, startups, and other "sophisticated" merchants, but we also have a bunch of mom and pop shops (of every sort) who care about stuff like the BBB.
As it turns out, in the couple of months since we had to take the BBB logo off, we have seen no difference whatsoever in our conversion stats.
The Made to Stick (http://www.heathbrothers.com/madetostick/) authors might say that the surprise of seeing an explicit claim about NOT being accredited would make the FeeFighers site more memorable. When's the last time you saw such a claim?
Agreed in full - you are an exception to the rule.
We've tested across general ecommerce, direct sales sites, lead generation, etc, etc - always comes up with the win when you're testing that "trust symbol" real estate . . .
Just a friendly question to anyone at BBB who may be reading this thread:
Suppose someone on here happens to own a business with BBB accreditation, and that person posts a comment to this thread critical of BBB's handling of the FeeFighters situation. Would you consider that a violation of your terms?
For the record, I'm not criticizing or endorsing what happened with FeeFighters, since I don't necessarily know all the facts.
This sounds pretty scammy to me. The good news is that I found a company on the Internet that lets you report scams: https://www.bbb.org/scam/report-a-scam/
I think this will lead to a Streisand effect for the BBB. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streisand_effect). By taking away a company's accreditation for a reason that has nothing to do with the company's business practices, the BBB is showing exactly how objective it is.
While I am totally on the side of FF here, it's hard to call a blog post titled "The BBB is a F&#ing Scam" an investigative blog post. The BBB may indeed be a F&#ing Scam (I have gotten horribly burned in the past for reporting something to the BBB), you gotta admit that the language in the blog post is pretty incendiary.
I'd be interested to know how you got horribly burned by /reporting/ something to the BBB.
(as a side note, is it the 'scam' word that you find incendiary? or the cussing? If it's the cussing, how old are you? To me, calling someone a scam is dramatic, while cursing doesn't really register.)
The story is one which I do not feel is appropriate to post publicly at this point. If you really feel like hearing it, email me at myHNusername@gmail.com and I _might_ oblige.
It is both the cussing and the use of the word scam. While I don't generally cuss myself, I have no problem with people speaking or writing like that, but I feel that it does frame the post as "I'm angry and have an anti-BBB agenda" rather than "I am a blogger trying to investigate a potential issue."
ah. If you don't feel comfortable talking about it, that's fine.
I dono I find the subject of the cultural acceptability of cussing to be kind of interesting. I'm considering adding appropriate asterisks to my own writing, more as a humerus affectation than anything else, as I personally can't imagine how the asterisks would make it less offensive, but eh, it's interesting to hear what people think about the subject. I sometimes wonder if I'm being way more offensive than I intend.
I find it wild at times that old fashioned companies like the BBB are so out of touch with the world today that they think a new company can not last long enough without their support.
It just goes to show that FeeFighters are shaking things up in both their technical field along with other business sectors. If you ask me, that is exactly what a start up should be doing!
If you do lose your BBB accreditation and want it back again, all you have to do is re-register (and pay the $600 or so) under a new name and you'll be back to square one. It sounds like a joke, but completely true.
One of my clients has a competitor who had an F rating due to numerous consumer complaints. They simply did the above and presto they were back to A- again.
"If you're not paying, you're not the customer, you're the product that's being sold." comes to mind. Perhaps we need more Angie's List and Consumer Reports, and less Yelp and BBB.
My assumption was that its influence is quite low since the advent of the Internet. If I were looking to see for a plumber or a moving company, I'd check Yelp or Angie's List not BBB.
This is why Consumer Reports is so trusted. They take no money from companies. They don't do ads or have sponsored listings of any sort. They buy the products retail and review them.
If you have sponsored listings you'll always be succeptible to this. There's rumors of the same happening on Yelp (reviews being filtered and such).
Is that drop down in-your-face share menu a Wordpress plugin or something? Fantastic way to get your attention. I think I've seen it before, not sure where though.
In a just world, there would be some sort of humorous regulatory body that would force the "Better" Business Bureau to rename themselves something more suitable in response to this story.
Lamer Business Bureau? Sycophantic Business Bureau? I leave the actual name as an exercise for the reader.
This has caused them to gain the "jrockway certified excellence" accreditation, which is, in my opinion, infinitely more valuable than the BBB's accreditation. So, I think, it's a net win.
(What's that you say? The limit of 0 * x as x goes to infinity is still zero? Hmm...)
Someone should make some sort of organization that objectively tracks sleazy businesses like this so consumers have a place to go to find out about it before committing to use them...
An organization that had goals similar to the BBB's would be very valuable for many consumers. What are some of the BBB's competitors? What's currently the best alternative?
For the consumers, there's the various state agencies. In Wisconsin, you don't contact the BBB, you contact the department of Agriculture and Consumer Protection. Those guys shut down a regional cellphone provider because of some complaints I and a few others filed about billing practices, etc. They responded to my web form submission with a half-hour very interested phone call.
I've heard similar stories in other states. I've always been told, as a consumer, to avoid the BBB and go through the state agencies.
Honestly, I don't know anyone who really seeks out BBB accreditation as a means of judging a business's credibility (I'm talking at the consumer level). In fact, the only times I've ever caught myself viewing any of their web content was for businesses I already knew sucked.
Maybe there's a market opportunity for a new business accreditation site. Though you have to wonder if anything short of a government entity or extremely well-funded nonprofit would be able to maintain its integrity.
Do I smell a Y Combinator success story in the future?
I declined to pay BBB when I started my business, but recently worked with a business that made me rethink the decision. This article reminds me of the vibe I got from the salesperson years ago.
Xpay asked the BBB what they could do to fix the problem.
It turned out that all they needed to do was grease the
wheels. The BBB noted that Xpay wasn’t a member
organization, and by becoming a member organization the
BBB would “look into” those 11 complaints to see if they
were worthy of being wiped clean. Xpay paid the BBB a
fee of $760 (see fee schedule). Within a couple of days
the rating had changed from an F to a C. A few days later
and another phonecall, and the rating was changed to an A-.
A friend of mine owns a small trucking business and was bidding on a contract for freight services for a university. Upon winning the bid they notified him that he had to get BBB accreditation in order to be awarded the contract.
This article reminds me of some of the stuff I read about the American Kennel Club and the whole puppy mill thing a few years ago (don't look into it unless you're willing to suffer severe outrage).
It's depressing how many companies that once were trustworthy have gradually been taken over by scumbags.
Interesting sidenote on that...
When the BBB contacted us the first time, they referenced that they searched through their records and couldn't find a company named xpay... pretty funny that they didn't realize that xpay was a pseudonym (even though I made that explicit in the blogpost)
They also spelled my name incorrectly (2 different ways!). A classy organization all around.
On the one hand Fee Fighters is fighting the "noble" fight, but they lose points for being so ideological.
BBB is a business and their terms are well known. Fee Fighters knew them and was required to abide by them and chose not to.
I do like that Fee Fighters is bringing this issue to bear. I'm personally not a fan of BBB. Pay to play doesn't seem like the incentives are aligned correctly. That and I can't afford their accreditation process for my business.
It's in the letter, which is in the post. You may not agree that those terms are good, but Fee Fighters agreed to them, and BBB is stating that they weren't followed. I doubt FF cares about fighting back in courts, so it will never really be settled whether they did or not.
Nobody here cares about "codes of conduct" that require members of organizations not to say mean things about those organizations, so this whole argument is a dead end and I strongly recommend we all not try to hash it out.
Nobody cares about the BBB code of conduct.
Quick guess: more than 3/4 of HN would agree that "codes of conduct" are harmful --- not just "not binding" but "harmful and evil --- that require members not rat out organizations as scams.
I actually quite agree that the BBB code of conduct is harmful. I'm not trying to argue for the code of conduct.
What bothers me about the article is that Fee Fighters is arguing from the point of a victim. Yes BBB has a harmful code of conduct, but Fee Fighters had a chance to review it and signed up for that.
> Nobody cares about the BBB code of conduct.
I don't understand this comment? This article is about how Fee Fighters lost their accreditation due to the BBB code of conduct? I think Fee Fighters cares about the BBB code of conduct. Many people who have upvoted this post and downvoted my original comment care one way or another I believe.
FeeFighters isn't arguing that they're a victim. They're arguing that they're the good guys, as evidenced by how obviously BBB is acting like the bad guys.
You're missing the fact that FeeFighters thinks BBB accreditation is laughable. They didn't write this post because a cosmic injustice was done to them. They already felt like the BBB was a cosmic injustice, even when they were accredited. They're gleeful that BBB is so willing to play the villain, and absolutely are willing to twist the knife into BBB's self inflicted PR wound.
If you're getting downvoted (I didn't), it's probably because you're missing the subtext. The BBB is worthy of mockery; this post mocks it; you seem surprised... why would anyone mock the BBB? Click click downvote.
>What bothers me about the article is that Fee Fighters is arguing from the point of a victim. Yes BBB has a harmful code of conduct, but Fee Fighters had a chance to review it and signed up for that.
The thing is, every agreement written by a lawyer has some overly broad "I can screw you" clauses. Heck, this one doesn't even read that badly. I mean, it sounds like they are reserving the right to stop people from associating the BBB with broadly offensive causes. I mean, if you are supplying the KKK with robes, I'd rather you not have my logo on your website. That seems pretty reasonable. If you turn around and then use that clause against someone who is legitimately criticizing you, you are a scumbag and should be called out on it.
You didn't need to be a chess grandmaster to see how this will play out. You barely even need to see one move ahead. What moron at BBB OK'd this? How incompetent is the rest of their organization?