Public vs. private forms: what’s the difference?

And why you should collect public feedback, even if your Ratecard is set to private (switched off)

You can decide to keep your Ratecard private or public, and therefore (un)publish verified feedback, and show or hide your reviews and testimonials. Keeping your feedback private or public is the difference between improving your business "behind closed doors" and managing your reputation with reviews and testimonials "out in the open".

On a different level, you can still decide per form whether it should collect private or public feedback. Public feedback is verified by Ratecard, and can therefore be published. If your Ratecard is private, you can start collecting reviews already in order to get a head start whenever you decide to publish it.

When you create a form, you can decide whether it should collect private or public feedback (and thus be verified by Ratecard or not):

Private form: always keep feedback internally

Private feedback will not be verified by Ratecard. This means that this feedback will never be published on your Ratecard profile, even if (the rest of) your profile is set to public (or switched on). 

Building blocks for a private form

Standard building blocks for a private form are, in this order:

• Rating (rating dots, 1-5)
• Departments
• Team members
• NPS (standard; variant: recommend to friend/colleague)
• Thank you page

Public form: publish feedback as a review or testimonial

Public feedback will always be verified by Ratecard, as the independent third party, via a big data analysis and human interpretation. This means that this feedback will be published when you turn the switch of your entire Ratecard profile to public. This way, you will be able to use this feedback as testimonials and improve your reputation.

Building blocks for a public form

Standard building blocks (in this order, the ones with * are required in order for Ratecard to be able to verify the feedback): 

• Header
• Paragraph
• Rating* (rating dots, 1-5)
• Departments, Team members
• Short text*
• Long text*
• NPS (standard; variant: recommend to friend/colleague)
• Confirm page*

Public vs. private feedback: pros & cons

• Private feedback can be used for improving your business, without anyone else ever seeing the "negative" feedback
• Private feedback lets you "test the waters", so you can find out in which (part of your) process(es) you can best collect reviews and testimonials
• Public feedback can be used for managing your reputation, by publishing it on your profile, therefore using it for marketing and sales purposes
• Public feedback will be visible on Google, which makes sure that you will be found more easily by (potential) customers