BBB Reputation Management

BBB publishes two separate numbers on a business profile, and they’re easy to conflate. The BBB Rating is a letter grade from A+ down to F (or "NR," No Rating, when BBB doesn’t have enough information) — BBB’s own assessment of a business built from its complaint history and how well it resolves complaints, how responsive it is when a complaint is filed, how transparent it is about its practices, and any licensing or government action on record. BBB states plainly that the Rating "is not a guarantee of a business’s reliability or performance," and it is not an average of anything a customer submits.

BBB Customer Reviews are a different, separate feature entirely: a 1–5 star review a verified customer leaves describing their experience, similar in format to reviews on other platforms. BBB’s own FAQ is explicit that "reviews are not considered as part of a company’s rating, as complaints are" and that "Customer Reviews are not used in the calculation of the BBB Letter Grade Rating." A complaint asks BBB to help resolve a dispute; a review simply records an opinion — and only the former can move the letter grade.

Because these are separate systems, they move independently. A business can carry an A+ Rating built on a clean complaint history while having only a handful of customer reviews and a modest star average — or the reverse, a strong star average sitting alongside a lower letter grade because of unresolved or unanswered complaints. Checking only one number gives an incomplete picture of what a BBB profile actually shows a prospective customer.

A third, separate concept again is BBB Accreditation — a business doesn’t need to be accredited to have a BBB file, a Rating, or customer reviews; any business BBB has information on can have all three. Accreditation is an optional, paid credential that requires affirming BBB’s Standards for Trust and, per BBB, maintaining "at least a B rating in all company-owned locations and its headquarters" to qualify.