How to Keep an A+ Rating With the Better Business Bureau

 By: MEREDITH WOOD

The Better Business Bureau (BBB) is one of the largest and most respected independent business review organizations in North America, and their A+ rating is a fantastic testament to a business’s success and longevity. It boosts consumer confidence that your business has ethical and fair practices, and when things go wrong, you can be relied on to fix them.

Basically, a Better Business Bureau A+ rating is one of the best ways you can communicate your commitment to quality to customers.

So once you’ve got it, what’s the best way to keep it? Here’s what you can do to ensure that your business stays recognized as A+.

What the Better Business Bureau Looks For

Even if you were accredited recently, it still pays to look over how the BBB rates your business, and understand what you need to do to push yourself over the A+ threshold.

Just like in school, the BBB letter grades are based on a score out of 100. To get an A+ rating, you need to get 97 points or more. The BBB bases their rating on 13 elements:

1. Complaint volume (weighted by complaint age)
2. Unanswered complaints
3. Unresolved complaints
4. Complaint resolution delayed
5. Time in business
6. Failure to address complaint pattern
7. Type of business
8. Transparent business practices
9. Failure to honor mediation/arbitration
10. Competency licensing
11. Government action (per action)
12. Advertising review (per incident)
13. BBB trademark infringement

But the way that the BBB scores it is that only 5 of the 13 elements get you points. Most of the requirements lose you points for failing to comply, so your reward for compliance isn’t points – it’s just not losing them. For example, if you comply with all government licensing, you get 0 points. If you don’t, then you lose 41 points.

Since the penalty for failing to comply for any one requirement is at least 21 points, putting you far outside the 97 point minimum for an A+ rating, we’re going to focus on the ways that you can get points. They are:

1. Complaint Volume (Weighted by Complaint Age): 0 – 15 points
2. Unanswered Complaints: 0 – 40 points
3. Unresolved Complaints: 0 – 30 points
4. Complaint Resolution Delayed: 0 – 5 points
5. Time in Business: 0 – 10 points

It’s pretty simple. These add up to 100 points, and you need to get 97 points to get an A+ BBB rating. Before we drill into them, it’s worth noting a few things:

• You need points from all of these categories to get an A+ rating
• Most of the points (90 points) revolve around complaints
• It’s considerably more important how you deal with complaints rather than how many complaints you have total

Now let’s look a little more closely.

Complaint Volume: 0 – 15 points

This measures how many complaints your business has had filed against you in the last three years. Your complaint volume score takes into consideration complaint age as well, so if you had two complaints 24 months ago they’ll count for less than if you have two complaints yesterday. The more complaints you have, the fewer points you’re going to be awarded. It is worth noting as well that your company size is also taken into account, so larger companies with more customers are at no disadvantage.

A low complaint volume is important to maintain an A+ rating, but not the most important. For starters, other than generally improving your business practices, there’s not really a lot you can do to get more points. And second, because it’s based on a formula of the BBB’s own device that weighs scores in an unknown way, it’s the hardest to predict what score you’re going to get ahead of time. Finally, it’s only worth 15% of the overall points, speaking again to the BBB’s focus on how your respond to complaints, rather than never getting any in the first place.

The key is to treat your customers with fairness and respect so you attract less complaints in general.                                                                                

Unanswered Complaints: 0 – 40 points

This is the first of two major categories (the other is unresolved complaints) which together make up 70% of the total points.

Unanswered complaints are complaints from customers that you haven’t provided an answer for. The less you have, the more points you get. In reality, to get an A+ rating, you need to have zero unanswered complaints. To know how to answer a complaint, you need to understand the BBB complaint process.

Every time someone files a complaint with the BBB against an accredited BBB business, the business is contacted and has 14 days to respond. If it’s still unanswered, the business gets another notice and a 14 day extension. Businesses are encouraged to address customer complaints at this stage directly with the customer. And for the vast majority of complaints, this should be easily achieved.

At this point, the complaint has been answered (if not resolved).

The key is to respond to complaints promptly. Even if it takes a long time to resolve, recognizing there’s a problem promptly helps you secure an easy 40 points and your A+ rating.

Unresolved Complaints: 0 – 30 points

Unresolved complaints are a little trickier, since this focus is on resolution instead of simple recognition. The score is simple – the less unresolved complaints you have, the more points you get.

Your first step is to try and resolve customer complaints directly with the customer. That much is obvious. But should you fail to reach an understanding, the BBB is there to help. They’ll first try to help informally, but they also have a huge number of trained resolution specialists should you need a little extra help.

This isn’t just about customer appeasement, the way a lot of other review sites are though. The BBB is absolutely willing to resolve cases even if the customer isn’t satisfied if they feel that the customer is being unreasonable. The focus is on fairness.

This score also includes your ability to deal with underlying themes in the complaints you’re getting. So if there is one sales representative who regularly accrues complaints against them but you refuse to fire them, that’s going to hurt your score.

The key is to work first with the customer and then with the BBB to resolve any complaints against you. Remember that even if you feel the customer is wrong, it’s still better to work with them to resolve the complaint and the root cause rather than ignore the issue.

Complaint Resolution Delayed: 0 – 5 points

This isn’t worth a huge amount but it’s an easy way to push you over the edge to A+. And given the high standard that’s expected for an A+ rating from the BBB, you need every point you can get.

This score is based on how quickly you start working on resolving complaints. A huge part of this is communication – responding to the BBB’s communication quickly, contacting the customer, and keeping them updated as the process unfolds.

The key is to be on top of your complaints. The BBB will email you when a complaint is filed – flagging those for immediate attention is a good idea so that nothing gets lost in email noise.

Time in Business: 0 – 10 points

This is a score assigned to you for however long you’ve been in business. The BBB doesn’t even rate companies until they’ve been in business for a year. After that, you get 2.5 points per year up to 4 years that you’ve been in business. So if you’ve been in business for 2 years, you get 5 points. 4+ years and you get the full 10 points.

The key is to provide documentation for how long you’ve been in business. If the BBB can’t determine when you were founded, they’ll take the date that you joined the BBB, slicing at least one year off your time.

At the end of the day, it’s not really about having a perfect, unblemished record of customer satisfaction (although that helps). Getting an A+ rating renewed is more about how you react to customer complaints. Provide consistent, responsive, high quality customer service and care and you won’t have anything to worry about.

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