INSUBCONTINENT EXCLUSIVE:
Customer reviews play a key role in helping people decide what to buy on consumer-focused marketplaces like Amazon or app stores, and the
same tendency exists in the B2B world, where nearly half a trillion dollars is spent annually on software and IT purchases
TrustRadius, one of the startups capitalising on the latter trend, with total feedback sessions today standing at close to 190,000 reviews,
has now picked up a Series C of $12.5 million led by Next Coast Ventures, with existing investors Mayfield Fund and LiveOak Ventures also
participating.The funding, which brings the total raised by TrustRadius to $25 million (modest compared to some of its competitors), will
be used to build more partnerships and use cases for its reviews, as well as continue expanding that total number of users providing
companies that have asked not to be named).TrustRadius mainly works with them on two tracks: to source a wider range of reviews from their
existing customer bases to improve their profiles on the site; and then to help them use those reviews in their own marketing materials
to big-up a product, or by rivals to knock it down, or coming from people who are being paid to put in a good word
The argument has been that the marketplaces hosting those reviews are still bringing in eyeballs and product conversions based on that
feedback, so they are less concerned with the corruption even if it longer term can likely sour consumers on the trustworthiness of the
whole platform.That belief is not wholly true, of course: Amazon for one has recently been making a huge effort to improve trust, by going
positive reviews would get it nowhere fast.At the same time, he noted that the company has held a firm line with its customers on making
improvements, and also provide more balanced feedback at the least from existing customers in order to give a more complete picture
(It also, like other reviews sites, makes people who provide feedback do so using professional credentials like work emails and LinkedIn
profiles.)That line has so far carried it into relationships with a number of software companies, which are using reviews as a complement to
their own sales teams, and the papers and analysis published by analysts like Gartner and Ovum and Forester, to reach people who are
CEO of LogMeIn, in a statement
swing in the digital world toward data protection and people getting increasingly aware of how their own personal details are used in ways
they never intended has presented an interesting challenge for the world of online services
though: by targeting IT buyers who have to make complicated purchasing decisions and most likely more than one, and in a way that ensures
each purchase works with the rest of an existing tech stack, they represent one of the rare cases where a user might actually want to hear
