Online Reviews: Can They Be Trusted?
Nearly two years ago after a lot of internet search, I found a company that does dental treatment using invisible alignment and that time I was amazed — how is this possible that a business can gather so many five star reviews! Around the same time I was looking to replace my air conditioner at home and amazingly found a local service provider with so many of those five-star reviews.
Fast-forwarding 2 years and I had to threaten the dental company with legal consequences to get my money back and eventually I had to sign that I must not write anywhere about my experience about the company and on that condition they will give us a full refund and they did. They wasted our time and the treatment plan that we signed up for — was a complete waste for a young adult in my family. As you can understand, for obvious reason I am not writing the name of the company.
About the air conditioning company very close to my neighbourhood had also turned out to be carrying loads of fake reviews in their review pitch. They did their installation job brilliantly and no complaints about that however when I went back to them for minor adjustment required after installation, my experience was not the same as pre-sales. Just because of that — do I restrict myself not to give a 5 star? Probably right! I would not, however, I wanted to write a review for them and through my attempt to write one, I realised that you cant write any review for them. As soon as you attempt to write a review, the page takes you to a different link which is not for writing a review!
My experience about both of the above is my personal one and I am sure you have many more of those kinds of experience that you have gone through with purchases or even your attempts to buy something.
I bought a laptop in July 2019 and after spending nearly four and half thousand dollars, I was not happy with the laptop and I was also not getting the support that I needed — neither over the phone nor at the counter. I was fuming every day with the problems I was going through and when looked for support, that included phone-support with a waiting time of twenty minutes plus, every time, — that obviously did not make me any happier.
My teenage son was sitting next to me and he was sick of my complains about the brand and their product and support. He wanted to check the reviews for me while I was driving and said to me — Dad, they have got quite good reviews on this product. what you are saying, no one is that unhappy and they have nearly two thousand reviews on the product you have got. I was surprised! I asked him, “Are they all five-star reviews? “ Pretty much !” he said. Not even one has criticised them? He looked at the reviews again and said — yeah if you scroll down a few, you will find one or two that's not the same as others. My question was, can you check if you can see a pattern. “Like what”, he said. Please check if you see five or six good reviews and then a one-star or two-star review. He scrolled through and said, “not always five or six but yeah there is a pattern of good reviews that you would not be able to count with fingers of your one hand and then the odd one comes and then again a fair few good ones.”
I am not sure if this review culture was introduced by Google or another company before that. This has certainly given the berth of many review companies whose sole business is to create a makeover for another business. It's their business to give your business a different outfit that you could not create for your own business. I have done a reasonable amount of research to find out if there is any way to stop a bad reviewer completely to write an unreasonable review and my finding is — there are none and the ones around you to give you a makeover, are not pocket friendly.
Its more like your way around to get more business without an attempt to improve your business since you know that you can manipulate the reviews, just like I shared my experiences where I found three remarkable companies manipulating their reviews. Its more like buying anti-smoking products, that cost you more than cigarettes.
There is a flip side to this as well. There are customers, sorry to say, take advantage of this review mania and many times we find that customer goes to review more so to bash a business when they, themselves may not be on their right foot.
To conclude the discussion, does it impact your business? The short answer is — No. There are many companies around the world, particularly in the service industry, that get bashed by reviewing customers through their reviewing weapons and I have seen many of them growing exponentially for the impeccable position of their product and services along with their sense of timing, without even touching or manipulating their reviews.
I did not want to depend on number of researches done on this subject rather wanted to resort to my personal experience and then look into what researchers say. Does my experience match with the one that came out through research? Not to my surprise, I found there are number of researches were done and they were published in many prestigious magazines around the world you can read through the links below they are not different from what I wanted to conclude.
Researchers do mention that about 1.5% of the people actually right online reviews and from my experience, it is always those ones who did not have the best experience based on their expectation which may or may not be set by the service provider rather a built-up demand within the consumer. In fact, a study shows that online reviews are far less trustworthy than you think. Once again from my personal experience, only people take the time and effort to write a review and it is certainly a negative one at a point when they are not satisfied with their demand and often those demands are not legitimate. If that percentage is 1.5 then I must say you are running a successful business when only 1.5 per cent is unhappy and it is the truth that you can't make everyone happy.
Please find some articles below with links to some remarkable researches done on this subject and these in-depth articles were published in very respectable publications.
