Vendor Intelligence

Your team is interacting with partners, vendors, contractors and service providers daily, and are constantly sharing their experiences with colleagues through email, by phone, or around the watercooler. This is the intelligence that gives your organization its competitive edge. Real Word of Mouth makes it easy to share, capture, and leverage this intelligence in a private, easy-to-use review format:

• Know your source - who said what and when about a vendor. Detailed attribution is automatically captured so that you can spot trends over time, resolve conflicting information, or go back to the source of the information for more details.
• Detailed contact information gets you to the right person at the vendor quickly, complete with maps and navigation if you're on the road.
• Team requests for vendors are linked to each review so that you can find similar vendors recommended for the same need.
• Powerful search, browse and filter tools help you rapidly find the vendors and services you need.
• Links to public online vendor profiles like Yelp, Google Reviews, LinkedIn, and Facebook provide additional information to vet prospective vendors.
• Concierge service. When clients look to your team for vendor recommendations, Real Word of Mouth has your vendor intelligence readily available so that your team can provide consistent and quality recommendations to your clients.

Institutional Knowledge

Individuals in your organization know how to get things done. When they leave, often that valuable knowledge leaves with them. This is especially true of organizations with regularly changing leadership or staff, or a significant volunteer base. Preserve this institutional knowledge with Real Word of Mouth.

• Review text can contain helpful tips and notes on how to best work with a vendor, their strengths and weaknesses, service codes and product names, or who to ask for.
• Search or browse by person to find all the vendor information contributed by someone.
• Use the aggregate rating to identify better vendors and services.
• Identify alternatives by searching or browsing by category or request.

Just Ask

Need a vendor recommendation? Simply send an email to your team via VendorBot, your digital assistant. It’s that easy. VendorBot takes care of the rest as your colleagues reply to you.

VendorBot works in the background to automatically turn the email responses you receive into new private recommendations, effortlessly growing and leveraging your Institutional Knowledge in the form of a deep vendor bench.

You might also receive responses directly from VendorBot. VendorBot analyzes your request, and then matches your request to past recommendations from your team. If VendorBot finds matching recommendations, it will email them to you.

Anyone on your team with email can contribute - no training required.

Automatic Review Capture

Real Word of Mouth automatically converts your email exchanges with your team into vendor intelligence. Do you like filling out forms? Neither do we:

• No data entry means that you can write your emails naturally and VendorBot will find and extract the critical information needed to create a review, including:
• Attribution - who made the recommendation and when
• Context - a link to the original request details
• Vendors that are being recommended - all we need is a name, address or phone and we can figure out any missing contact information. Sometimes as little as "Jenny's husband" can be enough to identify a vendor where Jenny is a team member.
• Comments become review text
• Images and screenshots can be attached and text automatically recognized (OCR). For example, a photo of a business card, or a screenshot from a web page or CRM.
• Contacts from your address book (vCards) can be attached and recognized
• Signatures and footers are automatically removed so that reviews are easy to read
• Privacy means that only you and your Team can view past requests and reviews
• No training. Seriously, none. If you can use email, then you can use VendorBot. No special commands.
• No login required. You don't even have to log in to use VendorBot privately and securely.
• Flexibility. A confirmation email with edit link is sent to the recommender with a copy of each automatic review created, just in case our algorithms made an error or you want to make changes. Just click on the link in the confirmation email to make any edits.
• You are in control. Only the emails that you send to Real Word of Mouth will be converted into reviews.
• No integration or IT support required. All you need is an email account. Your team can use any mix of email clients (Outlook, Gmail, Apple Mail, etc.) and devices. Automatic review capture works without IT support.
• Unsolicited reviews can also be sent via email - no need to wait for someone to request a vendor recommendation to build your Institutional Knowledge.

Rapid Review Entry

Are you a power user? We've got you covered. The Real Word of Mouth web app provides a rich UX that minimizes the number of steps it takes to request vendors or add a review:

• Over 200 million businesses from around the globe are available for selection in Real Word of Mouth.
• Add a new business easily if it's not already in Real Word of Mouth. This is especially helpful for vendors that don't have an online presence.
• Two clicks are often all it takes to add a new review.
• Simple and intuitive design makes Real Word of Mouth easy to use whether you are a frequent or occasional user.
• Phone, tablet or desktop access makes it possible for you to write a review whenever and wherever it's convenient. You can even start writing a review on your mobile device while on the go, and finish it later at the office or at home.

Automatic Response

Automatically tap into your Institutional Knowledge every time you make a request to your team via email and VendorBot.

VendorBot analyzes your request email, and then matches it against past requests and recommendations. If VendorBot finds matches, it automatically sends them to you as an automatic response.

If your team sends you personal recommendations, you will get those, too.

Want to do a quick search without asking your team? Send an email directly to VendorBot with a few keywords, and VendorBot will automatically search for matches among all the teams you belong to, and send the results to you via email.

No training. No data entry. No login. No IT support. Smart. Private. Effortless.

Want to do a deep dive into your vendor data? Check out our tools for searching and browsing.

Search and Browse Reviews

The Real Word of Mouth website provides many options to find the businesses you are looking for:

• Search by keywords. Then filter and sort the results to dig even deeper...
• Filter by relationship. Find reviews by only people you know. You can choose to see reviews just from friends, or from friends of friends if you want to see more. Or even just your own reviews.
• Filter by group. Narrow your search to reviews by members of a single group or team.
• Filter by person. Simply click on someone's profile review picture, and see only the reviews they share with you.
• Filter by range. Only see businesses within a specified distance from a location.
• Hyperlocal. Use a street address to find businesses within walking distance, or get detailed navigation including mass transit or bicycle.
• Browse by category. Explore Real Word of Mouth using the category browser.
• Sort results by date, by rating, by business category, by distance from your location, and more.

Privacy Control

You may not necessarily want to share every review with everyone. But you may still want to share some reviews with just people you know. We provide powerful and easy-to-use privacy settings that create a rich source of trusted reviews:

• Friends - share your review with just your friends and no one else.
• Friends of Friends - share your review with not only your friends, but also their friends.
• Group or Team members - Real Word of Mouth allows you to create groups and teams. Group members don't have to be your friends, but are usually people you know who share a common interest, belong to the same organization, or perhaps live in the same neighborhood or HOA with you. You can choose which groups to share with. A team is also a group, but then adds powerful email-based automation for collecting and accessing vendor intelligence from your team. Teams are typically organizations and communities that need a deep and wide bench of vendors, might have regular leadership changes, or perhaps have a staff of volunteers.
• Public - share with the general public, everyone and anyone. Your review will be visible to the business owner, and will appear in search engines.
• "Only Me" - Real Word of Mouth can be used as a personal and private directory of businesses, complete with private notes that only you can see.
• Combine settings - for example, share with your friends and a group or two.
• Write more than one review for the same business. For example, you can write a public review and a separate private review with more details just for your friends.

Secure

No matter how or where you use Real Word of Mouth, we keep your information secure.

• Encrypted communication - Even if you are using Real Word of Mouth on your cell phone at an internet cafe or hotel in a foreign country, we protect your information using the latest security standards, including 2048-bit SSL (Secure Socket Layers) Certificate Encryption.
• Encrypted email addresses - Your email address is encrypted in our database. If our database was ever compromised, neither your email address nor your password can be practically retrieved. Cracking a single encrypted email could take over 1000 years with today’s technology.
• Secure password hashing - We do not store your password. Instead, we encode (“hash”) your password into a complex set of characters that cannot be easily decoded. The longer your password and the more random the characters, the harder it is to crack. For example, a random 8-character password might be cracked in under 2 days, yet a random 9-character password could be cracked in under 1 year, but a random 10-character password would take over 100 years to crack.