Last week I covered the plans of a much-watched Boston startup, Dunwello, to shift into offering what purports to be the first Net Promoter-like score for individual professionals—a sort of middle ground between the approaches of Yelp and LinkedIn.
As of Friday, that shift is complete.
"After a year of testing how to most accurately reflect what a professional is like to work with we are rolling out the result," said Matt Lauzon, CEO of Dunwello and formerly the founder of Gemvara, in an email. "In short, we will be the first company to take the widely adopted 'Net Promoter Score' framework and apply it to individual people."
The score, on a scale of 1-10, will be compiled from consumers who give ratings on the site. Consumers can also leave reviews for professionals, though highly negative reviews won't be displayed, Lauzon said. ("I don’t see a lot of great outcomes from people being publicly shamed," he told me previously.)
Dunwello aims to help professionals market themselves, and also to help consumers make informed decisions about which professionals to hire, by getting a fuller picture than you’d get from LinkedIn or Yelp. The site "will allow professionals to build Dunwello profiles that feature real and relevant reviews from customers and coworkers, and it will provide consumers a place where they can view trustworthy reviews of individual professionals."
The ratings are also transferrable when a professional leaves a business. That is, when a highly rated professional leaves one employer for another, the previous employer’s score will drop and the new employer’s score will go up on dunwello.
Here are the full details of what rolled out on Friday, via Lauzon:
[The] release also opens up the ability for any users to view what professionals their peers recommend. This is the first of many steps we will take to help individuals discover professionals that they otherwise may not have connected with. Imagine what Pinterest does for products, but enabling people to discover the professionals that best match their style, budget, etc.
• A couple very important points that make us different from other alternatives:
• Dunwello profiles are portable. Today, if a hair stylist leaves a salon their reviews are left behind at their old salon. And if you read Yelp reviews, in many cases they are about individual people not the company as a whole. With Dunwello, individuals can take their profiles to their new employer. Further, if that individual is highly rated, the overall score of the old salon will actually go down and the overall score of the new salon will go up. It’s a much more fair and accurate system for all.
• We are focused on making sure Dunwello reviews can be trusted, but we also don’t believe that public shaming helps anyone, especially because it makes it hard for professionals to be comfortable soliciting honest reviews. With that, we’ve designed Dunwello so negative feedback gets reflected in the score but the content itself is delivered privately to the professional.
