Seerus Certification Charter
The importance of online consumer reviews in the consumer choice process represents a major economic challenge for companies. Therefore, the reliability of the processes of collection, moderation and restitution of consumer opinions as well as the respect by the user company of the following conditions answers the need for confidence necessary for the economic activity.
This document on the reliability of the processes of collection, moderation and restitution of online consumer reviews defines all the principles and requirements implemented by the review manager in order to process consumer reviews in a credible and fair manner.
By using the services of collection with restitution of opinions of Seerus, every user of Seerus commits himself to respect the general principles relative to the reliability of the collection, the moderation and the restitution as described below.
Seerus provides an application and is in no way responsible for its use by its user. However, Seerus provides the possibility for the user to benefit from a control of the good habits and customs, the control of the respect of this charter being translated by a publishable and visible certification by the final consumer.
1. Principles relating to the collection process
The objective of the collection is to collect the opinion of consumers in an impartial and controllable way. This implies that:
a) Only a natural person can submit a review.
b) Every review must be linked to a contactable and identifiable author (by email, phone, address).
c) There must be no bias in the collection
- No selection of consumers based on the perception of their experience (positive or negative) or their characteristics.
- Authors who have an interest in the object being evaluated cannot leave a review.
- The user has the choice to interview his prospects as well, as soon as their real experience is verifiable; in this case, his testimony will have to be identified as being that of a prospect on the feedback page (configurable when creating the survey).
- The same client can testify twice as long as 7 days separate the testimony from the previous testimony.
d) Principle of open circuit
All consumers must be able to leave a review. This is ensured by different means at Seerus level:
- The "leave a review" button on the feedback page of each Seerus customer (configurable in the review manager in the "settings" tab).
- The automatic sending of satisfaction surveys for companies that are customers of a Seerus partner software.
e) Prohibition to buy reviews
All Seerus users are forbidden to collect or publish opinions resulting from the purchase of opinions, carried out by themselves or by a third party, with the aim of influencing the global evaluation of the evaluated service. It is however left the choice to use the competition function present in Seerus as an incentive to respond to testimonials.
f) Collection verification process and tools
Seerus reserves the right, in case of certification or not, to impose processes of verification of the collected content to ensure that it complies with the principles and rules. These processes may combine automated tools as well as manual verification processes involving the user company's cooperation where appropriate.
The analyses performed are based on :
- Attributes collected during the consumer identification process;
- The user's behavior (frequency of writing reviews, history of contributions, location, etc.)
- Comparison of the consumer's rating to the average;
- Examination of the language used in the review.
2. Principles of moderation
The purpose of moderation is to ensure the conformity of the collected content with the European and national standards, and with the general conditions of the site in order to publish, reject or delete this content.
Principle: All the participants and acts related to moderation must be identified and traceable ("history" section in the Seerus notice manager).
a) Moderators' responsibility
Moderation is carried out by computer tools and/or human persons who are designated as moderators. The latter is in charge of applying the rules of moderation of consumer reviews in a strict manner in order to ensure the impartiality of the moderation.
The required abilities and the necessary means for the person who occupies the function of moderator are to
- Have a perfect command of the language in which the notice was written;
- To have access to all the information related to the history of the submission of the notice;
- To be able to entrust, in a timely manner, all the information related to the history of the submission of the notice.
b) Human moderation a priori
The human moderation (or manual) is carried out by the moderators who take note of the content of the consumer review to be able to decide on the publication or rejection of the consumer review.
A consumer review can be published without human moderation a priori: Seerus automatically publishes after 7 or 30 days the unmoderated reviews after they have been automatically analyzed for their content (the analyses focus on the identification of insults and unreadable/inconsistent reviews). In case of analysis identifying insults or inconsistencies, the latter will be placed in the tab "blocked notices" and can be published only after a human moderation from the moderator.
c) Time limits for moderation of the consumer review
A consumer review must be moderated within a certain period of time. This delay must be reasonable for a return close to the date of deposit of the consumer review (the not moderated reviews are published automatically either 7 days, or 1 month after their deposit: go to the tab "parameters").
d) Human moderation a posteriori
The human moderation a posteriori is carried out by the moderators; they still have the possibility of answering the testimony as well as asking for their possible suppression.
e) Post-moderation at the request of the author
The author of the opinion can make use of his right of withdrawal from the company, leading to the stop of the publication of his consumer opinion. It is also possible to ask for this removal from the page of restitution. To do this, an email confirming his identity will allow the deletion of the review afterwards.
It is not possible for an author of a review to modify it once it is published. However, an author of a notice can leave a second notice as soon as a separation of 7 days exists between the previous notice and the last notice.
f) Rejection of the consumer review
The author of the consumer advice must be systematically informed of the rejection of his advice and the reason for the rejection. At the time of this suppression, the moderator is also held to inform Seerus on the legitimate reason of this request for suppression. Following this, the company must give the consumer the possibility to rectify his rejected opinion to submit it again to the moderation.
g) Reasons for rejecting a consumer review
Consumer reviews can be rejected for the following reasons (list available in the review manager):
- If the company considers that its civil or penal responsibility can be engaged;
- If the content of the text contains insults or coarse language;
- If the elements relating to the identity of the author contain insults or rudeness;
- If the content of the text contains random characters or series of words without meaning;
- If the textual content is irrelevant to the subject being evaluated;
- If the attributes of the notice contain concrete elements of conflict of interest;
- If the textual content is poorly written to the point of being unintelligible;
- If a user makes an inappropriate comment about other content or its author;
- If the textual content to be published contains personal information, such as the name or surname of individuals who are not public persons, a telephone number, a specific physical address or an email address;
- If the textual content includes a credit card number, social security number, bank account number or any other information that could lead to identity theft;
- If the textual content indicates that the user did not complete the consumer experience;
- If the textual content includes a call for legal action;
- If the textual content mentions websites, hyperlinks, URLs, email addresses or phone numbers;
- The notice includes a testimonial from a prospect who has not had a contractual relationship
- If the textual content is clearly spam;
- If the elements describing the consumer experience are not filled in.
e) Moderation and removal
The moderation process allows to publish or not a consumer review. This process does not allow you to edit or delete a review from the database.
3. Principles and requirements for the feedback process
a) The feedback process must meet the following criteria and requirements:
- Display of all notices (except those rejected or deleted for one of the reasons mentioned in section 2);
- Display chronologically by default, from the most recent to the oldest based on the date of submission;
- Transparency of the calculation principles for the aggregation of scores;
- Quick restitution of positive, negative or neutral opinions. The publication of a review cannot exceed 1 month from the date of submission, including moderation
- Display information about the reviewer next to the review;
- Ability to flag a review as inappropriate, either by the community or by the representative of the product or service being reviewed;
- Public right of reply by the representative of the evaluated service for each review;
- Strict control of the deletion of reviews (via the Seerus account manager);
- Reviews will be automatically unpublished after a given period that can be configured in the review manager, which cannot exceed 36 months.
b) Criteria for deleting notices after publication
At the request of an author of a notice, the company must offer him the possibility to unpublish his notice, while keeping the traceability for the purpose of later verification of the notice.