The idea behind online reviews is great: everyone gets to make decisions based on the genuine, unincentivised opinion of others. Companies receive valueable feedback and incorporate that into their product and service offerings. The reality of how reviews are used in practice on sites like Trustpilot defeats that purpose.

Reviews about us broadly fall into one of three categories:

• 1) People who have never been a customer but write a review due to an email
• 2) Customers that we asked to write a positive review
• 3) Customers that write a negative review expecting a financial reward

Let's look at these three categories in more detail.

1.) People who have never been a customer but write a review due to an email

First, we're sorry if you received an email from us that you didn't like.

We sometimes do contact businesses by email and telephone when we think there would be a good fit for AutoSuggest. We do this, because usually, there is. And if our service would not be reasonably popular, we would not invest in promoting it. Also, as subscription based platform, we could not afford any outreach if every client would cancel after a month. While the first contact may be difficult, we would like to bring forward an argument, that in order to be able to do outreach at all, our service must be reasonably good. It's also not true that reaching out by email is illegitimate.

Some people are receiving plentiful email and may not appreciate most of them as it interrupts their day. This is understandable. Some, in particular marketing firms, see us as competition. Some may simply not like our email in particular.

We understand these points and see the perspective of the other person. Still, these are not reviews of our service. We would ask anybody unhappy with receiving email from us to use this form. We will make sure all gets excluded. Thank you.

As a side note, if you think you can do better than us or have some ideas that would be valuable to AutoSuggest, why not sell to us? We are always open for proposals and have a solid budget, so if you think you have expertise that we lack or a service we could need, send us a short pitch what you could do exactly to hello@autosuggest.net and thank you.

2.) Customers that we asked to write a positive review

Positive reviews about us are also not really "genuine". What happened here, is that we asked some clients to write a review, knowing that it would likely be positive. Many companies do that. We started doing this when it became clear that our clients would not write reviews unless we ask them to.

It's actually quite interesting: over the years we had clients wanting to buy our company, wanting to block all keywords in a certain industry, booking campaigns for other firms they owned etc. - but something that never happened, was somebody writing a review without us asking for it. It just did not happen.

Something we did, along with occasionally asking for a public review, was to have a page collecting feedback we received from customers by email. This page is probably what comes closest to actual customer reviews but again, this is positive feedback that we hand-picked.

By and large clients are happy with our service. We have many clients who are with us since many years, agencies who book AutoSuggest for their client base etc. By and large, and especially looking at "hard metrics", such as how long companies stay with us, people like our service. We believe this is not reflected fairly by some of the TrustPilot reviews, many of which have been written by marketing agencies who see us as competition for their client's budgets.

However, this does not mean that there are no unhappy clients! 100% customer satisfaction is difficult for us, because clients do not book "AutoSuggest", they book a particular set of keywords for a particular market for a particular brand in an industry with particular metrics and then have widely different evaluation criteria and expectations. Online marketing is difficult. We definitely have some unhappy clients but also many fans, people who really like it and everything in between.

3.) Customers that write a negative review expecting a financial reward

The last group of review-writers is the most complex one and the smallest: people who are or have been clients and now write a negative review. They do that to receive a financial reward in exchange for removing their review. They have learned that this is a way to get the company to contact them and give them money, whether they're right or wrong, basically.

We do not cooperate in that case and do not offer money to people who write bad reviews. We admittedly did this in the past a few times (this is the easiest way to get a 5.0 star rating and any company can do it) but no longer do, as it leads to the "good" customers subsidizing the "bad" ones, based on subjective and arbitrary criteria. It also leads to a world where extra-loud complaining is seen as a competitive advantage.

We also do not do refunds since our billing is already success dependent (your brand being shown as an autocomplete suggestion).

However, one exception where a refund is given, is for the setup fee, when no keyword is getting listed. This case is quite rare. But you can simply write an email (after a few months we will also contact you proactively) in that case and the funds will be returned within 2-3 days. If you fund your account by wire transfer we may ask for your bank details, for direct debit and credit card we will process your refund directly.

We also do have a separate complaint process, which you can start by sending an email with your case and subject to

complaints@autosuggest.io

You should only use this after contacting our regular support. What we basically do is have a partner look at and decide these cases. It does not mean all your wishes will be granted but a fresh pair of eyes will review everything.