Quality Assurance

Quality assurance is an issue of the highest priority for ProvenExpert. While guaranteeing our Terms and Conditions and Review Guidelines, we place particular emphasis on looking out for the interests of our users:

• Service providers and companies (registered profile owners);
• Submitters of customer feedback (evaluations, reviews, and ratings); and
• internet users looking for information about registered service providers or companies.

ProvenExpert is not a review platform based on a classified business directory; rather, ProvenExpert grants its profile owners independence with regard to the use of customer feedback. Each ProvenExpert profile is created by its respective owner, not by ProvenExpert. The profile owner is responsible for the profile's contents. Evaluations, reviews, and ratings are the subjective opinions of those who compose and submit them.

The Profile Owner can decide him or herself how customer feedback is collected and submitted: (1) by means of email invitations; (2) by publishing survey links on web pages or social networks; (3) by publishing surveys on Facebook profiles; (4) by means of verbal invitations with access codes that can be entered on the websites ProvenExpert.com/expert-rating and ProvenExpert.com; and/or (5) by means of the Profile Owner permitting profile visitors to submit evaluations by changing his or her profile settings.

ProvenExpert provides a basis for conducting internal quality assurance, among other things. Apart from this, profile owners can publish their profiles and ProvenExpert rating seals for advertising purposes. If permitted by the profile owner, the profile owner may be contacted, and access codes may be directly entered or requested from him or her. Access codes may also be printed on survey cards to be given to others.

Customer feedback is submitted by means of standardized online surveys. These surveys have been developed by industry experts on the basis of evaluation methods used in qualitative competency assessments. They have been specially tailored for each field of business activity and optimised on the basis of extensive testing. Each survey contains up to 60 industry-specific competency criteria. The relation of these criteria to the respective survey topic is determined by the profile owner. Profile owners can also decide which categories and competencies are surveyed, customise access codes, and pause or delete surveys.

ProvenExpert only accepts verified customer feedback:

• Composers of feedback must confirm that they have used the services of the service provider or company being reviewed.
• Composers of feedback must accept the general Review Guidelines and Privacy Policy of ProvenExpert.
• If the validity of the information provided by the composer has not already been confirmed by the profile owner by means of an invitation or permission sent via email, the composer must do so: either (1) by email; (2) by means of a social network account (LinkedIn, Xing, Facebook); or (3) by means of their ProvenExpert account.
• Aggregated reviews must be verified and must conform to the profile owner's field of business activities. This means that reviews must be confirmed and authenticated by the reviewer by providing an email address, logging into the review website, or by using a social media account, and they must refer to services that correspond to the activity stated on ProvenExpert.
• Customer feedback that has not been confirmed will not be submitted to the profile owner or published.
• Each composer of feedback is only permitted to participate in a given survey once.
• Profile owners are not permitted to participate in their own surveys.
• Disposable or throw-away email addresses will not be accepted for submitting or verifying customer feedback.

The profile owner will be automatically informed of new customer feedback by email.

Profile owners can analyse customer feedback separately or as a whole, and can designate which reviews are displayed publicly. If the profile owner chooses not to publish all of his or her reviews, the display of his or her public profile and rating seal will be modified to maintain transparency. More information is available in our FAQs.

In order to prevent misuse of the platform, ProvenExpert reserves the right to remove customer feedback and profiles that do not comply with the General Terms and Conditions. This includes in particular the following reasons:

• offensive content;
• false information; and/or
• suspicion of manipulation.

If a ProvenExpert profile or review is suspected of violating the Terms and Conditions, they can be directly reported to ProvenExpert at any time.

ProvenExpert adheres to the most modern of web standards and continuously monitors website activity in order to provide the highest level of data security. Data transfers for sending customer feedback, as well as non-public ProvenExpert profiles, are protected by SSL encryption. We do not transfer data to third parties. To learn more, read our Privacy Policy or contact our data security administrator.