Deciding Who to do Business With? Think Again if You’re Counting on the Better Business Bureau to Guide You
I came across an interesting article in the Los Angeles Times about how the Better Business Bureau grades companies on a peculiar curve. It calls attention to the fact that paying the BBB to be listed as an accredited business appears to have instant benefits in the agency’s ratings.
So an accredited business automatically receives a half-grade boost to its rating. A B-minus business, in other words, will become a B.
And according to Steve Cox, a spokesman for the Better Business Bureau, the highest grade an unaccredited business can get is an A. Only an accredited company — in other words, one that pays an annual fee — can receive an A-plus.
I am well-aquainted with the shortcomings of the BBB ratings system. TRS has been a paying accredited member of the BBB for nearly 11 years. When I joined, I was a firm of 2 people. In 2005 we expanded our business nationally and grew very quickly. Today we are a firm of 50 people, 10 of which are licensed professionals (either tax attorneys, CPAs or EAs).
My partner and I are both active, licensed CPAs. And for the first few years with the BBB, we enjoyed an AAA rating. We also only serviced about 100-125 clients per year back then and we essentially didn’t have any complaints.
We soon learned that there is a good reason why large companies do not subscribe to BBB membership.
Today we are rated a B- and we service about 175 new clients per month or approximately 2,000 plus clients per year and growing. And we just expanded to help more taxpayers and we signed a new lease for 11,000 square feet with the same landlord we’ve been with since 1998.
In reality, we have a 99% customer satisfaction score! That’s based on the inverse of the complaint ratio. There are currently 20 complaints that are listed on our BBB report that encompass the last three years - amongst thousands of satisfied customers. So out of servicing 6,000 clients - that’s .004% of our customers who have filed a complaint!
Additionally, it appears that the BBB has NOT started working on a new equation to take into account a business’s size (even though they have told my attorney that they “are currently working on a model that will incorporate this (size) factor into the rating”).
I have been diligently working with the BBB to resurrect our ratings to where it SHOULD be, which is in the “A”’s.
But don’t take my word for it, check out our success rate and testimonials from our satisfied customers!
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Tags: BBB, BBB rating, better business bureau, Michael Rozbruch, tax expert, tax relief success rate, tax resolution, tax resolution services, Tax Resolution Specialist
