There have been a lot of stories recently about certain Yelp and TripAdvisor reviews being fake – paid for by unscrupulous restaurant and store owners (here are a few: http://goo.gl/LVKTiK, http://goo.gl/WKNo4n and http://goo.gl/4ZrDOw). I don’t blame these sites, they simply have too many reviews to vet them all. In fact, they rely on automated algorithms to do most of their work. I wish them luck because I love their service, but it’s a problem that’s not going to go away for them since they let you review basically every consumer-facing business on the planet and they will probably never be able to keep ahead of the unscrupulous and ingenious folks who want to game their system in massive numbers. In order for these sites to be a trusted source of objective information, they first and foremost need to ensure their audience that all reviews are authored by legitimate, objective, and credible sources.
That brings me to a subject near and dear to my heart, the Proformative Exchange review site for “Office of the CFO” focused products and services - https://www.proformative.com/exchange.
Until Proformative came along. Among our tens of thousands of discussions and comments, roughly one third are related to buying products and services. That number was so high it surprised all of us here and led to the creation of the Proformative Exchange. Clearly corporate finance leaders were in desperate need of a peer-based purchasing resource. Here are a few examples straight from the site: ADP vs. Paychex http://goo.gl/qvUN09 was a popular question. Answered by more than 30 people and viewed over 40,000 times. Clearly a purchase many folks are researching. Here’s one asking about
Traditionally we may have asked our network of trusted service providers for their suggestions when it comes to purchasing, but that is slow and incredibly ineffective. Sure your audit partner has customers using a major system or two, but they have rarely if ever use those systems themselves (auditors do not use ERP or BI systems day-to-day like a Controller or
Thus, we built the Proformative Exchange https://www.proformative.com/exchange to harness the real-world inputs of our user base of corporate finance practitioners. We have made it easy to review and find reviews of thousands of products and services aimed entirely at the office of the
To ensure the quality of these reviews Proformative has a Triple Vetting Review Process™ in place.
- Must be a corporate finance or directly related practitioner
- Must be a real, verifiable person
- Must not be in the product/service ecosystem they are reviewing
We start by making sure that the reviewer is a corporate finance or related practitioner. What does that mean? Corporate finance, accounting,
We don’t just look at the person’s title, however. We look at their company. And we look at their company’s website. We do that to ensure that they don’t work for the company being reviewed, don’t work for a reseller or partner of that company, and that they don’t work for a competitor or competitive reseller/partner.
Wow, that’s a lot of manual process for each review. Why do we do it? Because to not do it would mean that we can’t have high confidence in the utility and value of our user’s reviews. And we care.
By the way, we never change reviews, either positive or negative, due to vendor pressure. We have been asked to edit or remove negative reviews by some of the biggest companies in the world and we simply won’t do it.
Since we have many million fewer product and service reviews than Yelp, we can deliver on our Triple Vetting Review Process™. And we will continue to do so in order to maintain the quality and utility of this site to our users. The Proformative Exchange: high quality, peer-based reviews for your mission critical “Office of the CFO” products and services - https://www.proformative.com/exchange. You can’t afford not to use it.