Due Diligence and Ongoing Monitoring

Good Day All, and Happy Friday,

We are in the process of vetting a vendor and are finding several negative reviews in our google searches. For example, they have 1 recent 1 star review and 7 complaints at the Better Business Bureau, this year alone.

They also receive only 2.9 stars on Trustpilot.com

According to glassdoor.com, employees give it 4.4 stars as a good place to work. This is better results, but I'm more concerned about service levels.

Can you tell me what sites you use to look at customer reviews for your vendors and/or employee reviews? 

I'm also interested in sites or companies to use to do background checks on company principals to ensure employees are legal and are receiving proper wages.

Thanks in advance for any assistance!

Hey Cheryl - 

Be wary of things that don't add up, like the Glassdoor reviews on a company that seems shaky.  We have personally witnessed a certain company making many fake reviews to negate any negative ones that get posted on there, and we also know of at least one legitimate negative review that they somehow got removed.  Just wanted to put that out there.  Unfortunately I don't have better suggestions for places to look and now feel like it's possible none of them are really reliable.  Sadly.  

Hi Cheryl,

I ran into a similar situation recently with a vendor that our marketing director brought forth for on-boarding review. The online reviews (including TrustPilot and BBB) were similar and after reading the complaints in more detail, a picture was painted of non-refundable up-front payment, bot-driven customer service and non-existent client relationships. I approached our Marketing Director with those findings alone and discovered that the company had refused to provide a representative and was only communicating through a sales@____.com email address. In our situation we were able to leverage our own brief experience with the vendor to confirm the concerns expressed in the reviews and the vendor was not pursued further.  In this care, approaching the perspective vendor manager about their "customer experience" proved valuable.

Just thought I'd share. Regards,

Matthew Mauldin ARM, CRVPM II

Salisbury Bank

Cheryl,

Depending on the type of service the vendor provides, online reviews might not be 100% reliable.

I work for a company that is a niche service provider in a highly regulated industry. We are hired by businesses to provide service to individuals and get 1-star reviews and BB complaints more often than we'd like, only because the end user (the individual) does not understand the regulations, how we've come to service them, and that those regulations give the business that hired us the right to do so, for the individual's own benefit.

Like your vendor, our employees love working here and embrace our mission and values. 

If possible, maybe asking for references might give you a better picture.

Very interested in this thread!  I'm assessing vendors and business partners on behalf of a mid-sized technology company and have been grappling with how to assess reputational factors in real time.

Glassdoor and similar sites can be a forum for very particular workplace issues and not give the clearest view of overall company culture.

While we have licenses for adverse media aggregation and sanctions screening, I wish there was a faster way to gather a real-time reputational 'score' across a number of risk domains. How are others handling this?

Hi Cheryl:  We use the internet for adverse media but try to stick to the facts such as news releases, BBB complaints (not reviews) and the BBB rating, CFPB complaints (we're a financial institution), Federal Trade Commission, pending litigation (which might also be found in SEC filings for public companies), etc.

We don't completely discount employee reviews but if we see a news story about lay-offs, then it makes sense that we might see a lot of negative employee reviews. The most helpful employee reviews we found were in one case where several former employees commented on "technology debt" (where systems were quickly patched haphazardly with the intent of going back later to fix it properly) - we asked the vendor about it and it was true. They shared their remediation plan with us, and then we were able to track their progress.  

Our thinking on reviews is that generally people that don't have something nice to say have more energy to say it publicly.  We also consider whether or not the complaint is for a line of business we have under contract. 

To tie these thoughts together - just today I saw a lot of complaints about customer service for one of our vendors, and employee reviews that complained about the lack of training. (Are these related?)  The complaints were about a direct-to-consumer line of business, but we have a back-office product under contract and our IT folks are very happy with it.  On the surface, it looked terrible, but when all of the available information was considered together, the picture seemed a bit different.

There are regulations for financial institutions that prohibit performing transactions for certain people, businesses, and/or countries.  While not a true background check, we run all of our vendors against a federal database on a regular basis to ensure we are in compliance with federal regulations.

Great topic!