A Video Conversation with Angie Barnett, President and CEO of the Better Business Bureau of Greater Maryland - Part III

3/17/17

Angie Barnett

Click here for Part IPart IIPart IV

Working towards greater standards for trust between people and businesses

Angie Barnett is the president and CEO of Better Business Bureau of Greater Maryland. For over a century, BBB has provided people with reliable, unbiased information about the myriad businesses serving their local communities. The national BBB hosts reviews of millions of companies in the US, and facilitates hundreds of thousands of disputes between consumers and businesses each year. As an independent not-for-profit organization unaffiliated with any government entity, BBB seeks to improve standards of marketplace education and trust.


EDWIN WARFIELD: How is BBB using the internet to expand and continue pursuing its mission? Does BBB compete with other review sites, such as Yelp and Angie’s List?

ANGIE BARNETT: BBB’s website, bbb.org, is super easy to find. And where we have elevated—and I believe this is we’ve made consumers, customers, potential customers more aware of BBB—is in the fact that in 2016 we had 1.3 million inquiries to Better Business Bureau in Maryland. That means these individuals were looking to BBB’s resources to give them background information about Maryland businesses. These are individuals that want to check out a business before they do business with them. They’re looking at their history, how they handle their customers, what their rating is; are they accredited with BBB? Why is that number important? I jokingly say: “I would love the day when Better Business Bureau doesn’t receive a complaint, because people did their homework before they chose somebody to work on their home, their car—before one business chose another business to do their website or for any of their professional services.

We know, as evidenced by our numbers, that BBB serves a very important role in the community, in providing free resources to give you what we know is reported by customers. The information that we report out is as reliable as we can get, relying, again, on two factors. One is the customer to give us information about a business. You could say one of our core services is investigations. Investigations frequently are prompted by customers telling us about their experience in doing business with a business, and we scratch ours heads and say, “hmm, this sounds a little fishy,” and so we dive in. It’s that customer experience that’s reported. But, we balance that by the good businesses, reliable businesses—they had to verify: “hmm, yes, this is my customer.” It's a dialogue between—and we serve as a conduit between—the potential customer and the business. We bring them together, unlike some review services where you can just throw out a review there, and t can be anybody: it can be the business owner's mother who wants everybody to know they’re wonderful; it can be a disgruntled employee who goes on there and slams a business. We don’t operate that way. We verify the customer. We verify the relationship in the marketplace between the customer and business for us to take action or post any information.

Q. Would you say that your primary “customers” are businesses, or is it consumers?

A. Better Business Bureau really has two customers. Because we are a business association and we’re very committed to our business community, we use the information we have as tools to help serve consumers and the public.

BBB Scam Tracker was created as a way to give anybody an opportunity to post a scam that they were either a victim of, or a scam which they experienced but hopefully didn’t fall victim, and that’s a way to give public information to scams. And you can actually watch a scam sweep across the the country and Canada to some degree. You see trends in scams. You see what people report. Our victims also can tell us if they’d like to tell their story through the media. They want to post that they actually lost money. That way, we’re able to tell the real impact of scam and fraud on consumers with one of the tools that we have at BBB.

It’s a very interesting tool. If you believe you are a victim of fraud—and remember, businesses are victims of fraud as well; it’s not just the consumer—so if you have an experience in which you receive that crazy phone call that lets you know that the IRS is trying to collect your taxes that you owe, you can post that scam threat on the Scam Tracker. We’ll track it for you and it's a great way to see a compilation of information.

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