Those are really good points.
> It feels like in many cases, you're reliant on the company having a good channel for addressing concerns (Some do, some don't). Reviews aren't necessarily a good fit, yet customers may go straight there, for want of something better.
That is true and even more so having a social media presence in our case. Our approach is to focus on companies that already have a social media presence and propose an alternative way to track customer satisfaction and reduce the subjectivity baked into that metric by relying on the facts and measuring customer service quality instead. We still provide users with a space to express their feelings as they would on review sites and receive support from other users in similar situations, while we work with companies to get better at serving their customers.
> Do you think the chance of abuse is high? (Eg a competitor posing as an unsatisfied customer, or a customer abusing it trying to get free things) What mitigation plans do you have for this, if you think it could come up?
Moderation is key for any platform like ours, because our user community is placing an enormous amount of trust in us to ensure that we’re helping genuine users like themselves, which means letting through genuine complaints on our platform and bringing down abusive complaints where we have compelling evidence. We have processes in place for complaint moderation today, and as we scale, we will automate more of these processes where needed.