If you keep a spreadsheet of approved answers, with a column for who confirmed each one, you have already started one.
Why keep one fact at a time, instead of one document
A product sheet goes out of date as a whole document. One thing in it stops being true, the rest is still mostly right, and nobody can tell which sentence went wrong.
A list of facts goes out of date one fact at a time, where you can see it, with a name next to it. An agent can ask about one fact. A person can be reminded about one fact. And you can see that nine facts are overdue, and here is who owns them.
The four states a fact can be in
| state | what it means |
|---|---|
| current | someone owns it, and it was checked on time. An agent may repeat it |
| overdue | the check date has passed. Nobody has to do anything for this to happen |
| unowned | nobody is named as its owner, so no agent uses it |
| contested | two people disagree. Both sides stay on show until someone settles it |
The last three all mean the same thing to an agent: tell the buyer you are checking, and ask the owner. So the agent has one simple rule to follow for all three.
What makes it work
- An owner is one person. A whole team is too vague, and someone in product would know counts as no owner at all.
- If nobody owns a fact, agents can't use it. Reynforce doesn't show an error for this. People learn to work around errors, while an empty owner is a gap someone wants to fill.
- A certification works differently. Someone outside your company sets its renewal date, and renewing takes months, so it reminds you well ahead.
How long it takes to fill in
About an afternoon, the one time we measured it. That was one person who knew their product well, and they put an owner on every fact. It was one company, so treat it as one piece of evidence, too small to be a benchmark. We have not yet tested whether owners keep their facts confirmed month after month.
What one company found when it wrote its facts down has the detail.
Where Reynforce fits
The Facts page in Reynforce is an agent promise register. You can start from facts Reynforce suggests from your own web pages, and each one stays a suggestion until a person accepts it. Before an agent uses a fact, it asks Reynforce for that fact's state, so it never works from memory. Each time a fact is used, the Activity page shows it, along with the version of the fact the agent used.
When Reynforce is the wrong choice
- Your agents never say anything about your product, prices or terms. Then a register has nothing to hold.
- You have a few facts that never change. A shared document with a review date will do.
What it costs
£99 a month for each agent for your first 10 agents. After that it is £79 a month for each agent, up to 49 agents. If you pay for a year at once, you get two months free. If you want us to set it up and get it signed off with you, that starts at £2,500, paid once, and the price depends on the agent's job. Pricing has the rest.