43. trurating

Founder: Georgina Nelson
Founded:  January 2014 (launched Jan 2015)
Website: www.trurating.com

If you’ve ever visited a business review website then you’ll probably have read many reviews created by “ranters or ravers” i.e. those who are extremely satisfied or dissatisfied with their experience.

These reviews don’t often provide an accurate or representative view of how the majority of customers feel which can be both frustrating for businesses who want to learn from feedback, and customers who want to know whether reviews are reliable.

Georgina Nelson recognised this issue and came up with the idea for getting feedback questions onto business payment terminals, so that consumers would be more inclined to answer the questions and both businesses and consumers would benefit.

Despite having no background in the payments industry, Nelson launched truRating in January 2015 as the world’s first mass point-of-payment consumer rating system.

With a huge team of 51 employees to assist her, Nelson has already signed up 150 outlets to use the service including The Real Greek and Patisserie Valerie, and truRating is now poised to go live with a number of large UK retailers.

A fast, simple and anonymous ratings system, Nelson says that with truRating an average of 88% of consumers rate a business – a stark contrast to the 1% of customers that usually provide feedback to businesses. What’s more, tech firm Gartner has reported that truRating’s payment terminal reviews are actually 40% more accurate than post-experience reviews.

Already live in Australia and with a US pilot lined up, by 2017, Nelson believes truRating will have collected 300 million ratings – more than the total number of reviews collected by TripAdvisor and Yelp during their lifetimes to date. And with stats like the above, we reckon Nelson will have retailers queuing up to implement the software…