2/5/2010 8:38 AM (PST)

The companies that are accredited must meed BBB standards, pay a fee and they support the services of the BBB for the whole community. We would suggest that you contact the BBB at www.bbb.org to check any company you are considering using. Non-accredited businesses are there also and some of them have good ratings.

2/5/2010 9:33 AM (PST)

Manda, This is a good question. Our members do pay fees for the accreditation process just like hospitals, social service agencies, and companies in many other industries pay for their accreditations. Our scoring algorithm awards extra points for getting through this process. It may seem like hair splitting, but our members are not given points for being an Accredited Business but for signing an agreement to always meet our standards of ethics in customer relations and business operations. The issue of awarding extra points for achieving accreditation in our scoring algorithm was actually a big point of contention a couple years ago when the BBB across the nation was considering adopting a more complex rating system. For what it's worth, the Los Angeles BBB and its partners who developed and deployed the original BBB rating system (later revised upon national rollout) maintained a member-neutral scoring treatment in their original version. The rating a Better Business Bureau assigns a company is determined by a scoring algorithm that includes such elements as its type of business, length of time in business, compliance with competency licensing requirements, complaint volume, complaint history, seriousness of complaints, complaint response behavior, whether or not the business has committed to our standards, and our experience with the industry that the business is in (some are more problematic than others). Complaint generation risk and companies' resolution behaviors have been tracked and scored by BBBs across the nation for the past one hundred years. Our perspective and methods still stand the test of time and are an important and valid tool and benchmark for both consumers and businesses for evaluating marketplace interactions.

3/24/2010 3:33 PM (PST)

So what you are saying is these companies are paying for those A+, A's and B's. Is that correct? Because with out being "Accredited" they can not reach those statuses, right?