South African consumers can now rate, review and connect with brands and government institutions through a newly launched smartphone application by Plus 94 Research, a market intelligence firm.

The application provides consumers with a platform that allows them to raise their voice on products and services and ultimately influence the quality of the products and services they receive.

“We’ve seen astonishing growth in consumer power over the past few years thanks to social media and other online channels,” says Plus 94 Research CEO Sifiso Falala. “This app will take it one step further.”

The app, called Plus94it, is available on both Android and iOS and will come preloaded with many of South Africa’s biggest brands — there are 500 companies listed in the app already, including retailers, banks, parastatals and government departments. Users are able to suggest companies to be included in the application.

Users are only able to rate a product or service once every 90 days, “Ratings need to be relevant to experiences that users enjoyed in the last seven days,” says Falala. “We want to prevent people from rating experiences that happened two years ago.”

He says that the incentive for people to use the app is to recommend new services and improvements on products they use.

Once the app’s sample sizes increase, businesses will also be able to subscribe to Plus94it reports that will provide them with detailed reports on the ratings and feedback received.

The cost of these reports will depend on the sample size that a business has received on the platform. A company can expect to pay anywhere from R1 000/month for sample sizes smaller than 50 people up to a maximum of R15 000/month for sample sizes larger than 1 500 people.

“Traditionally, market research companies control the people that they want to talk to, they control the sample size and self-selection does not feature at all,” says Falala. “With this app, the respondent chooses to participate [and so] this is a valuable sample set.”

Falala says that this app does not remove the need for businesses to conduct customer satisfaction surveys.

Ratings are done on a scale from one to 10. After someone has entered a rating, they are asked to explain the reason. The app asks if they will recommend the product or service to family and friends, this will deliver a Net Promoter score to businesses that subscribe to Plus94it’s reports.

Once someone has completed the three-step process to rate and comment, they can then view the average of ratings from other users.