If you’re considering applying for Better Business Bureau (BBB) accreditation, you’re likely hoping that it will help your business gain credibility and customer leads, and you probably have questions about the process:
What does it mean to be BBB accredited?
What does BBB accreditation cost?
Is BBB membership worth it?
We’ve analyzed what it means to become a BBB-accredited business so you don’t have to.
In this post, we cover:
At the end of this article, we also explain that there are other, achievable ways to attract customers and build trust in your company, like optimizing customer reviews, executing first-class marketing campaigns, and providing outstanding customer service. Then, we show you how our field service management software, ServiceTitan, can help you do that.
You can skip to the ServiceTitan section here.
What is the Better Business Bureau?
The BBB is a membership organization that helps people find local businesses, brands, and charities they can trust. The private, nonprofit organization is over 100 years old and has 5.4 million business profiles based in the U.S. and Canada.
To become a BBB-accredited member, businesses must adhere to the BBB’s set of standards and be graded by a rating system that focuses on ethics, trust, and customer service.
What Are The Benefits of Being BBB Accredited?
The perceived benefits of being a member of the BBB are:
Being seen as a credible company that’s been vetted by a trustworthy, impartial organization
Having the back-up of a heavy-weight organization to help arbitrate customer complaints
Increased customer leads generated by consumer searches on the BBB platform
Is BBB Accreditation Worth It?
Enhanced Credibility & Trust
Becoming a BBB-accredited business can potentially benefit your small business profile by helping to build credibility with new customers.
Many consumers consider a business that adheres to the BBB standards as having a higher level of trustworthiness. More mature generations view a BBB-accredited business as more likely to act in good faith to provide high levels of customer service and put more marketplace trust in companies that the BBB endorses.
Not only is consumer trust a factor, but the BBB logo can also be a nice addition to marketing materials, social media, or your business Yelp profile.
Help with Complaints Handling
The BBB helps manage the dispute-resolution process when consumers complain about the services of a BBB member business. It is helpful to the BBB member to have this support and provides another layer of confidence for the consumer.
When establishing a good reputation in your local community, negative reviews on any website could be a hit to your bottom line.
Unlike many review sites, the BBB takes extra measures to maintain the integrity of customer reviews by requiring customers to provide their contact details and not allowing any anonymous reviews. So, BBB members can be confident that the reviews are genuine and can then respond appropriately.
Lead Generation
According to the BBB’s website, in 2023, people turned to the BBB more than 218 million times to view business profiles to find quality service providers.
We don’t know how many of those views turn into leads, but businesses with BBB accreditation hope that being a member of the BBB will attract more customers.
What About BBB Membership Costs?
Small businesses are more prone to feeling the financial squeeze of any initial investment in getting a new company up and running.
The BBB fees are tiered by company size, so most small-business owners find the cost of BBB accreditation to be manageable. While fees are not currently available on the BBB website, our understanding is that companies are charged an annual fee that ranges from a few hundred dollars up to around $4,000, depending on the size of your business.
How to Get BBB Accreditation
The BBB accreditation process is painless for most businesses. You simply fill out a form online with your company’s basic information and the BBB contacts you for additional documents after processing your request.
You’ll need to provide your local BBB branch (e.g. California) with banking information, licenses, bonds, a record of your customer complaints, and the BBB accreditation fee. The BBB uses this information to calculate your business’s BBB rating.
What is a BBB Rating?
A BBB rating is the letter grade that the BBB assigns to businesses based on a number of variables. According to the BBB website, the BBB rating represents the BBB’s opinion of how the business is likely to interact with its customers.
The BBB uses a formula to calculate a business’s BBB rating. The algorithm weighs 13 factors to calculate BBB accreditation standards:
Complaint Volume (Weighted by Complaint Age)
Unanswered Complaints
Unresolved Complaints
Complaint Resolution Delayed
Failure to Address Complaint Pattern
Type of Business
Time in Business
Transparent Business Practices
Failure to Honor Mediation/Arbitration
Competency Licensing
Government Action (per action)
Advertising Review (per incident)
BBB Trademark Infringement
Using these categories, the BBB scores businesses with a letter grade — an A+ is the best rating, while an F is the worst. The organization awards a BBB seal with a blue checkmark to those companies that have an “enhanced credibility” of at least a B rating.
How Do Consumers Check a Business with the Better Business Bureau?
Finding out if a business is BBB accredited is fast and easy for potential customers.
Consumers simply go to BBB.org to search by business name, location, or category to find whether a business is accredited. Business profiles also include consumer complaints, customer reviews, the BBB letter grade, and other basic information such as address and phone number.
The BBB and Customer Complaints, a Two-Way Street
As much as the BBB has been a trusted source for good-faith consumer reviews and ratings for over a century, the organization did face scrutiny over the validity of its rating system over a decade ago for being a pay-to-play platform.
Today, the BBB website states that “complaints received from the public” are part of the BBB’s opinion of how a business will interact with the public, and that, “Customer Reviews are not used in the calculation of the BBB Letter Grade Rating.”
Not fully factoring in customer reviews has garnered some negative attention from businesses and consumers alike.
While the BBB’s standards for ratings have come under fire, it’s still generally considered to be a good way to build trust, respond to negative reviews, enhance marketing materials, and improve your business profile.
What Does the Better Business Bureau Do If My Company Receives a Complaint?
Positive ratings and consumer complaints are par for the course with any business profile across rating-platform services. As mentioned earlier, the BBB helps your business navigate customer complaints and negative reviews through its arbitration processes.
Filing a complaint is free for consumers.
After a review or complaint is filed, your business will receive notification of the posting and will be asked to respond within 10 days.
Acting as a neutral third party and mediator for both parties, the BBB will work toward resolution of a consumer complaint that will leave the business and the customer satisfied.
Alternatives to the BBB
Having BBB accreditation can be worthwhile for your business, but most consumers start their online search on more popular sites; many don’t visit the BBB site at all.
Websites such as Yelp, Trustpilot, Google reviews, Angi, and many others provide similar services for customers to rate their interactions with your company. Some of these platforms charge for businesses to be listed, while others have free options. Monitoring and optimizing your reviews on these high-traffic sites will probably give you more ROI for your efforts.
Companies sign up for BBB membership to build trust in their businesses and increase leads. But you should focus on these three alternatives in place of or in addition to having BBB accreditation to gain credibility with your customers and achieve growth:
Optimizing customer reviews
Executing effective marketing campaigns
Providing outstanding customer service
We built our field service software, ServiceTitan, with marketing and reputation management tools that help home services businesses do just that.
How ServiceTitan Customers Gain Credibility & Increase Leads
Optimize Customer Reviews
ServiceTitan’s Marketing Pro has several features that help you better manage your reviews on multiple platforms, gain valuable insights into how they’re helping or hindering your business, and keep your business listings up-to-date.
Automate Review Requests to Generate More Reviews
Getting reviews from customers is a numbers game. Your business will always receive some negative reviews, and these can’t be removed from most review platforms. So instead, accumulating as many positive reviews as possible will counterbalance that over time so your overall star rating will continue to increase.
ServiceTitan automates survey requests to customers via text or email immediately after every job has been completed. This makes it easy for customers to share their experience while it’s still fresh in their mind.
This means that you’ll receive more reviews and, because the request is sent out instantly, reviews will come in sooner so issues can be dealt with swiftly, too.
Respond to All Your Reviews from One Dashboard
Your company’s response to reviews (good and bad) is critical to how your business is perceived. With ServiceTitan’s software, responding to reviews on multiple sites is simple.
Our software consolidates reviews from all of your review platforms (Yelp, Yahoo, Google Reviews, etc.) into one place. This means you don’t have to login to each review site one-by-one to respond to those reviews — you can respond directly from the ServiceTitan dashboard. Plus, you can set up alerts so you always know when a new review has been posted on any of these platforms.
We recommend that you respond to good and bad reviews.
Further reading: How to respond to a negative review
Track & Match Reviews to Specific Jobs and Techs to Gain Insight
Because ServiceTitan lets you centrally collect and store data from all of your reviews, you can match your customer reviews to specific technicians and jobs and pinpoint exactly what’s working and what’s not.
Digging into this level of detail provides insights on how your technicians are doing and how your business is being perceived. This allows you to reward technicians who have performed well or provide extra coaching where needed.
You can tailor ServiceTitan’s dynamic reporting dashboard to track metrics across your entire business, such as individual CSR performance, ROI from specific ad campaigns, and revenue trends by day, week, or month.
The ability to study analytics on a granular and a big-picture level lets companies adjust their activities and budgets accordingly and become more agile.
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Keep Business Listings on Review Sites Consistent
Most review sites require someone in your business to keep your company information updated. If they don't, then your details could be inconsistent. For example, your company name could be listed as “XYZ Plumbing” on one site and “XYZ Plumbing Inc.” on another.
When this happens, this means your business cannot always be found easily, and it might discourage your customers from leaving a review. In addition, sometimes, search engines don’t attribute all of your reviews to you because your listings don’t match.
ServiceTitan’s reputation management feature ensures your company name, address, and phone number are accurately listed across more than 60 business listing sites (e.g. Yelp, Facebook, Google Business Profile, Yahoo, etc.).
This saves companies the time and inconvenience of having to constantly check listings and update them. It also increases the chance of your reviews being correctly attributed to your business.
You can try our free Listings Scan tool here.
Use Tactical Marketing to Attract Customers
While optimizing customer reviews is important for your brand reputation and ultimately lead generation, review management isn’t even an issue unless you have a reliable source of incoming leads. To do that, you need to have functioning and effective marketing campaigns.
ServiceTitan’s Marketing Pro has been designed to help home services companies do the following for their marketing:
Deliver Targeted Email Campaigns
Generic email campaigns typically don't resonate with customers, but targeted email campaigns are one of the most effective ways to attract business, earning $40 for every $1 spent.
ServiceTitan's email marketing feature allows you to send super-specific email campaigns by segmenting your email audience by ZIP code, age of equipment, date of last service, new homeowner, and more. Using data already collected in ServiceTitan, you can target previous customers with a “We Miss You!” email campaign, follow up with existing customers on unsold estimates, or offer a discount to new homeowners.
Sending targeted emails is easy. Choose from our huge range of email templates, adjust the text to fit your campaign, and deliver to your chosen audience.
Targeted emails attract higher open rates and bring in more calls.
With ServiceTitan, you can monitor the exact ROI for each campaign by tracking the email performance and the revenue attribution within the ServiceTitan dashboard.
Leverage Direct Mail Marketing
Combining traditional direct mail marketing with social media posts and other digital marketing works well for many companies, especially when trying to establish a good reputation within the local community.
ServiceTitan has a library of postcards that businesses can choose from to execute their direct mail campaigns. Set-up takes minutes. Simply choose your design, adjust the text, then print and mail your postcards to your chosen audience.
Direct mail campaigns cost a set fee per postcard, so you only pay for the number that you send. And, as with the email campaigns, you can track the results of each campaign so you can see exactly which ones are driving revenue.
Integrate with Google Local Services Ads
While your Google reviews might appear on the first page of organic Google search results, buying Google Local Services Ads makes it more likely your company appears at the top of the page, above PPC ads and organic listings. This means potential customers can view a snapshot of your business — such as your company name, Google review rating, and years in business — to determine whether your company fits their needs.
Costs for Google Local Services Ads vary, but you only pay when a customer contacts your business through the ad. This cuts down on useless job leads from customers simply price-shopping for your services online.
ServiceTitan integrates with Google Local Services Ads to allow homeowners to directly schedule online appointments with your company, and provides business owners with ROI metrics on every campaign. This makes the whole process easier for the customer and improves the chances of them booking an appointment with your company.
Lead Tracking & Reporting
To help you make informed decisions on how to spend your marketing budget (whether that’s on BBB membership, other paid review sites, or reputation management software like ServiceTitan), you need full transparency about all of your leads.
ServiceTitan offers campaign-tracking telephone numbers and real-time ROI reporting for all your marketing campaigns. For each campaign, you can track the number of calls, how many jobs you booked from those calls, and the number of sales made from those jobs right in your ServiceTitan dashboard.
With ServiceTitan, you can create a marketing scorecard with all of your current marketing campaigns (email, direct mail, Google Local Services Ads, etc.) and then tie all new customers to the specific marketing campaign that brought them to you.
You can then boost spending on campaigns with higher returns, and drop channels with poor performance.
By measuring the ROI for each campaign, you know exactly how much business you’re getting for each dollar you spend so you can review your activities and adjust accordingly.
For more ideas, read our full marketing guide.
Deliver Exceptional Customer Service
The most important way to promote and grow your business is to deliver awesome customer service from the very beginning.
Travis Ringe of ProSkill Services, a $14 million full-service home services company in Arizona with more than 7,000 5-star Google reviews, explains that his CSRs and techs go above and beyond by always offering to do more, such as providing ladder service to help elderly customers change lightbulbs or smoke detector batteries, or simply bringing the trash can from the curb.
ServiceTitan also helps you deliver exceptional customer service with these features:
A call booking tool so you can greet customers by name and ask all the right questions using customized prompts
Scheduling and dispatching features that match the right technician to the right job and ensure they arrive on time
Automated texts that confirm appointment times and provide links to their tech and a GPS tracker so customers know who is coming and when
Estimate and proposal templates that techs can build while on a job and show to customers via a mobile app
Customer financing to help customers choose what’s best for their budget
Payment processing tools with flexible and convenient payment options for customers
And more
All of these tools are fully integrated and communicate with each other so you never have to spend time transferring information.
Ready to Try ServiceTitan to Help Gain Credibility & Attract Leads?
Many companies sign up and pay for BBB accreditation to build trust and increase leads. But there are other ways to do that, including optimizing customer reviews, creating effective marketing campaigns, and delivering awesome customer service.
ServiceTitan’s field service software has the marketing and reputation management tools that help home services businesses gain leads from tailored marketing campaigns while offering exceptional service — from a customer’s first point of contact right through to paying their invoice and providing a customer review.
To find out whether ServiceTitan can help your business attract leads, schedule a free personalized demo here.
ServiceTitan Software
ServiceTitan is a comprehensive software solution built specifically to help service companies streamline their operations, boost revenue, and substantially elevate the trajectory of their business. Our comprehensive, cloud-based platform is used by thousands of electrical, HVAC, plumbing, garage door, and chimney sweep shops across the country—and has increased their revenue by an average of 25% in just their first year with us.
