Trustpilot reveals how every company invites and receives reviews in world-first innovation

15 January 2020 - London - New York - Copenhagen - Trustpilot, the leading global consumer reviews platform free and open to everyone, today announced the release of its new Transparent Inviting feature. The feature provides greater insight into how every company receives, invites and how much they respond to reviews on Trustpilot.com, helping everyone to make better decisions about which companies they choose to trust and buy from. Its introduction is a world-first and is the next step in Trustpilot’s larger initiative to bring more openness and transparency to its platform and the review space as a whole.

“Reviews are fundamental to how companies and consumers of all ages engage, improve things and build trust. I believe deeply that it’s not just how many stars companies have, but how they get those stars that matters. This is what companies and consumers are telling us and why we continue innovating to remain the world’s most transparent review platform,” said Peter Mühlmann, Founder and CEO at Trustpilot.  

Anyone with a buying or service experience can post a company review on Trustpilot at any time, and companies cannot pre-screen or moderate what other consumers read. Every company can also use Trustpilot to invite and respond to reviews for free and purchase additional tools that automate the review invitation and insight gathering process. 

The new Transparent Inviting feature now allows everyone to see: 

• Whether the reviews were invited by the company or not (‘organic’ reviews), the split between the two, and how this affects the TrustScore 

• Star distribution by reviews source 

• Timeline of reviews received over the past 12 months

• Whether a company responds to all, some or no consumer reviews. 

• Other useful information includes how recently they were reviewed and when the company first set-up or ‘Claimed’ their Trustpilot account 

• Whether a company is using Trustpilot’s free or paid services 

• If the company uses review incentives

The new Transparent Inviting feature will also complement the existing information from Trustpilot’s Transparent Flagging initiative, showing how companies flag reviews should they believe they do not adhere to Trustpilot’s user guidelines. 

Carolyn Jameson, Chief Legal and Policy Officer, Trustpilot said, “As an independent platform that sits between companies and consumers, we fight extremely hard to ensure the integrity of Trustpilot is always upheld. We’ve already lifted the lid on how companies use our reporting tools and will now show how they receive and invite reviews. Making this information more open and transparent is another way for us to promote the best possible behaviour, with the majority of businesses who do continually act in a genuine and consistent way being the ones who will continue to shine.”

Providing more transparency is important for people who use Trustpilot. A survey* of more than 2,000 UK Trustpilot users reveals 84% want to know more about how companies use reviews behind the scenes and 78% said knowing this would make them trust those companies more.  

All information relating to how businesses receive reviews and flag reviews will now be displayed in the ‘activities’ section of the companies profile page on Trustpilot.com.

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Survey methodology
*Over 2,000 Trustpilot users in the UK surveyed at random on Trustpilot.com.

About Trustpilot
Trustpilot is the world’s most powerful review platform - free and open to all. With more than 77 million reviews of over 345,000 domains, Trustpilot gives people a place to share and discover reviews of businesses, and we give every company the tools to turn consumer feedback into business results. Our mission is to bring people and businesses closer together to create ever-improving experiences for everyone. Trustpilot reviews are seen more than 2.5 billion times each month by consumers worldwide. With offices in Copenhagen, London, Edinburgh, New York, Denver, Berlin, Melbourne, Vilnius, Trustpilot's 800 employees represent more than 40 different nationalities. For more information, visit  https://www.trustpilot.com/