For the past few months, we’ve received an outpour of commiseration from business owners and consumers alike who have, like us, been bullied by the BBB. In order for the BBB to maintain its credibility, the majority of its audience must believe in both its integrity and its mission.

This apparent disconnect between what the BBB purports to be and what people were telling us seemed off.  So we decided to use Lab42, a new service that makes surveying really easy, to ask business owners and consumers what they really thought about the BBB.

Let’s look at consumers first. All of the consumers surveyed knew the BBB’s mission was to help the general public. When asked to think of adjectives that described the BBB, here’s what they said:

As you can see, the words that jump out are helpful, trustworthy, and reliable.  Now, we were curious if the consumers had such a high opinion of the BBB, whether the BBB rating influenced their decisions.

It seems that consumers are still influenced by BBB ratings, but not overwhelmingly so. Let’s look at what business owners had to say. Here are the top adjectives that come to mind when business owners are asked about the BBB:

Now, we start to see a bit of doubt. Though similar words like honesty and professional are used, “money” is prevalently mentioned. So, if business owners do have suspicions about the BBB, they really shouldn’t take their grades so seriously, right? Here’s what happened:

Interestingly enough, though business owners are more doubtful, they let the BBB’s ratings influence their decisions a bit more strongly than the general consumer. We’ve seen this anecdotally through our user tests where business owners are consistently looking for BBB ratings and requesting them while using FeeFighters. Let’s clarify this by asking both groups outright if they trust the BBB.

Consumers:

Business owners:

This backs up the previous point: though business owners are more skeptical of the BBB, they still trust it more consistently than consumers (79% business owners agree, vs 66% consumers). This might have to do with the fact they interface more with the agency, so we decided to ask: how many businesses had been reported to the BBB?

Surprisingly, almost 40% of business owners we asked had been reported to the BBB. So it seems that the BBB is maintaining its credibility through more business owners believing in its credo than consumers…business owners who likely have interfaced with the agency at some point.

While consumers have more crowdsourced review options to judge businesses, it seems that business owners are the ones who are still propping up the BBB. We hope many more who have emailed us with similar stories as to how they were bullied will take a stand and make sure this agency doesn’t continue its pay to play practices.