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In the decade since it emerged, electronic relationship management has remained a fast-changing field. The latest challenge for marketers used to controlling the message is how to let customers talk with one another publicly via company websites.
As reported on MassHighTech.com Tuesday, RatePoint Inc. received $10 million in Series B funding, led by new investor Castile Ventures, to assert itself as an early player in the field of reputation management. But the Needham company is up against a veteran player: Waltham-based ClickSquared Inc., which also announced Tuesday that it had secured $11 million in Series B funding from JMI Equity, Waltham-based ABS Ventures and Flybridge Capital Partners of Boston.
ClickSquared’s online social-media applications are in demand, said incoming CEO Wayne Townsend, whose appointment was also announced this week.
“Our clients’ experience is working with (a review) directly and not censoring it,” he said.
Companies can benefit from allowing customers to interact, even when comments are negative, he said. “It’s been a challenging thing for our clients to accept. It really forces our clients to be in a position where they really are focused on the right behaviors in terms of service.”
While RatePoint offers some of the same electronic marketing abilities that ClickSquared does, it is focused on becoming the dominant platform provider for companies seeking to enable and track customer comments on their sites. When former GeoTrust Inc. executives Neal Creighton and Chris Bailey launched RatePoint.com in January 2007, the site offered a free service that filtered online reviews. By 2008, the company had identified growing concern about online reputation management among small and midsize businesses.
RatePoint allows companies to solicit reviews and surveys from their customers, and then manage the response to and publication of that material, Creighton said. The company aims to become, like GeoTrust, a widely used standard for establishing the reliability of customer reviews published to company websites.
“The issue is, how do you determine from a third-party point of view the credibility of that input?” said Castile managing general partner Nina Saberi. To be successful, RatePoint will have to become one of two or three dominant players in what she believes is an emerging market.
“Who has the best chances? People who have the most complete offering that they don’t just offer individual pieces,” Saberi said, adding that many of the older companies in the relationship-management space were constrained at their founding by technology. “Now newer companies have an opportunity to offer a more complete offering.”
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