Dipti Gore
“As someone who has worked for many years in the technology industry, I had so many people coming to me for advice about which technology vendor to hire for their project. In the B2C space, recommendations have clearly moved in the online space. More and more people are moving online to look for recommendations about a product or service. It was time that this recommendations process moved online in the B2B space as well, ” said Adarsh Arora when talking about what made him start his venture Reputada.”In hindsight, it seems so natural and obvious to come up with such a product ! ” he adds.
It is a well known fact by now that finding a good vendor in the IT space is a big challenge for customers. IT projects are known to run over budget and over time and can cost customers lot more than what they anticipated thus badly affecting their planned budgets. It is therefore becoming more and more important for companies to choose the right vendor for their projects. Genuine recommendations from other vendors can prove to be extremely useful while selecting a right vendor. As a customer it will be extremely beneficial to know what experience other customers have had with the particular vendor. The feedback however has to be genuine – a problem that sometimes even the B2c industry deals with.
And there are many stakeholders to this problem. While the customers face the problem of finding the right vendors, the vendors too find it difficult to convey their differentiation to the customers. Frankly, when it comes to IT services business, it is difficult to convey your differentiation to your customers. The customers want something made and every IT vendor comes up with the best (most of the times low cost) alternative to the problem. It becomes really difficult to differentiate the real good IT vendors from the bad ones. The only thing that can really differentiate you as a vendor is the feedback from your customer.
The Reputada product thereby is aiming to solve this problem for both vendors and customers.
The core idea behind building Reputada is that good vendors should get more work and customers should get access to good quality vendors. The product has been created keeping this core ideology in mind.
[box type=”shadow” align=”aligncenter” class=”” width=”600″]Reputada is a SAAS platform that allows vendors to sign on and ask for feedback on meetings, milestones, deliveries etc from their customers. The feedback system has been designed after consulting with a psychologist and consists of 7 accolades with each accolades having multiple dimensions.[/box]
The customer can provide feedback on multiple accolades and dimensions. The feedback therefore becomes available to the vendor in real time helping him understand how the project is progressing instead of having surprises at the end of the project.
If the vendor decides to publish the feedback publicly, the Reputada algorithm creates a score which can be made visible to the public and will be available on Bing and Google search engines when customers search for the vendor company. Vendors will therefore be available on search engines along with their scores thereby helping customers understand how good or bad a particular is.
But I can still go on collecting feedback only when the project goes well and skip asking for feedback when the project is in problem. This will make only the good feedback visible and the bad feedback will not be recorded by the system. Well Reputada has a solution for that. A customer can provide feedback for a vendor without the vendor asking for it. The vendor is then sent a mail saying “ABC has given a feedback. Please accept if you recognize ABC and ABC is your customer”. This way if the customer is genuine, vendors have psychological pressure to accept the feedback.
The product looks at creating a normalization between big and small players and allows small players who provide good quality service to have a chance at getting good customers.
Adarsh Arora, CEO, Reputada
Reputada has been created by a group of individuals who have been in the tech business for many years. Adarsh Arora is the CEO of Reputada and has created, managed and nurtured four successful start-ups (Athena Security, Lisle Technology Partners, Peritus Software Services and Vista Technologies). Reputada is his 5th startup. The team started working on building the Reputada product 2 years ago. The product was created 2 to 3 months ago and the company is now aggressively looking to market the product. The company has 600 registered customers till date.