How Does Better Business Bureau Work?

Most review platforms boil down to one thing: what did customers say. BBB is different because it runs three separate systems at once — a proprietary A+ to F letter grade, a public complaint-resolution process, and a standard 1-to-5 star customer-review layer — and a business can be strong on one and weak on another. Understanding how each one actually works, and which one you control, is the difference between fixing the right problem and chasing the wrong one.

This guide walks through what BBB actually is, how the grade gets calculated, how the complaint process differs from a review, and how a business can legitimately request reviews and respond to complaints without running afoul of BBB’s own rules.

A grade, a complaint file, and a review score — three different things

When someone looks up a business on bbb.org, they see a letter grade from A+ down to F prominently displayed. That grade is not a star average. It’s a proprietary score BBB calculates from a mix of factors, and it can move sharply even when a business’s reviews stay flat, or barely move at all when a flood of new five-star reviews comes in.

Below the grade sits the complaint file — a public record of formal complaints customers have filed through BBB, along with whether and how the business responded. Below that sits the customer review section, which functions more like a standard star-rating system: consumers leave a rating and a written review of their experience. All three are visible on the same profile, but they’re scored, weighted, and updated independently.

How the letter grade actually gets calculated

BBB publishes the categories of factors that feed into the grade, even though the exact formula is proprietary: complaint volume measured relative to the size of the business, whether complaints were answered and resolved, the business’s transparency about its practices, how long it’s been operating, and whether it has any government or advertising-review actions on file.

Complaint responsiveness is the factor that surprises the most business owners, because it’s counterintuitive: receiving a complaint isn’t what tanks a grade. Not responding to one is. A business that gets a complaint, replies promptly, and resolves the underlying issue through BBB’s process typically keeps its grade intact. A business that lets the same complaint sit unanswered for weeks takes a real hit — often a bigger one than the complaint itself would have caused.

Accreditation is a separate, opt-in program

Being "BBB Accredited" is not the same as having a good grade. Accreditation is a paid, opt-in program with its own standards a business agrees to meet — things like advertising honestly, being transparent about business practices, and honoring its promises. An accredited business pays annual fees for the designation and the marketing benefit of the accreditation seal.

Because accreditation and the grade are calculated independently, an unaccredited business can hold an A+, and an accredited business can still carry open complaints or a lower grade. Businesses evaluating whether to pursue accreditation should understand it as a separate decision from the work of improving the underlying grade and complaint record — the grade-improvement work matters regardless of accreditation status.

How the complaint process works, and how it differs from a review

A BBB complaint is a formal process, not a casual comment. A consumer files a complaint describing a specific dispute — undelivered work, a billing issue, a warranty problem — and BBB forwards it to the business with a set window to respond. The business’s response, and the consumer’s follow-up, both become part of the public complaint record.

This is a meaningfully different mechanism than a review. A review is one-directional: a consumer posts their opinion and the business can reply publicly, but there’s no structured resolution step built into the platform. A complaint is closer to a mediated dispute — BBB is actively facilitating an exchange between the two parties, and the outcome (resolved, unresolved, unanswered) becomes a visible, graded data point on the business’s profile.

Requesting reviews compliantly

BBB customer reviews follow the same integrity rules most legitimate review platforms enforce: businesses can and should ask customers to leave reviews, but the request has to be made the right way.

• Invite every recent customer to review, not a filtered list of the ones you’re confident were happy.
• Never offer a discount, gift, or other incentive in exchange for a review.
• Never write or submit a review on behalf of a customer, even with their verbal permission.
• Keep review requests separate from complaint resolution — resolve a complaint because it’s the right thing to do, not as a trade for a review or a withdrawn complaint.

BBB rewards a specific kind of business behavior: one that answers when things go wrong and is transparent about how it operates, on top of earning genuine positive feedback. Businesses that treat the grade, the complaint file, and the reviews as three things to manage — rather than one number to inflate — tend to see the most durable improvement.

For the full picture on what actually moves a BBB grade and how to prioritize complaint resolution against review generation, see our BBB reputation management overview.