Reviews: Valuable?

How valuable are reviews, both to consumers and business owners?

Background

A protégé, who possessed a 5-star rating in her reviews, got a 1-star rating from a disgruntled customer. The customer accused her of scamming him.

My protégé contacted the customer and discovered that there was confusion, allegedly based on the item’s description. She adjusted the description and refunded his money. She also said that she’d appreciate it if he’d feel comfortable modifying his review, which, to his credit, he did raising the rating from a 1 to a 4.

Here are some insights I gained from this discussion.

Insights

One of the first things that struck me was that the customer posted a review before contacting my protégé to make her aware of the problem, and giving her a chance to remedy it. We’re all human. We make mistakes. If we want others to give us grace when we make mistakes, we need to do the same for them.

Something I learned from my protégé is that if she had responded to the review, the customer wouldn’t have had an opportunity to edit it. I’ve been in the business world for 60 years and had no idea that responding to a customer review prevents them from editing that review. I can’t help but wonder how many other business owners aren’t aware of this social media “rule” and, consequently, by responding, locking in a poor rating.

I told my protégé that, as a consumer, I typically look at only the bar chart of reviews. If the percentage of 1 or 2 ratings is small, I ignore them. One of the advantages of a lengthy tenure in business is that you come to realize that there are people that you simply can’t please…no matter what you do.

My practice of only viewing the bar chart ended when a company I was researching had mixed reviews. As I scanned the individual reviews I noticed that some people had posted reviews as many as 5 or 6 times. In other words, they were loading the system with favorable reviews and consequently skewing the results. Whenever I see this, I immediately look for alternatives to the company I’ve been researching. I’m certain that is not the result they were seeking.

Years ago I saw Alan Weiss, consultant and speaker, do a presentation in which he discussed “smile sheets.” Smile sheets were the evaluations that trainers and speakers passed out at the end of a program to get feedback on how their program was received.

He said that he didn’t use smile sheets, and recommended that the audience not use them. His rationale: if we got 99 5-star ratings and a single 1-star rating, we’d devote time and energy fretting over that 1-star rating…and he’s right, it’s our nature to take criticism personally. Again, it’s folly to assume that we’re going to please everyone.

Consumer perspective

As a consumer, reviews can be helpful if we take the time to evaluate the reviews in terms of the reasonableness of the complaint and how it was handled. We also want to check to make sure that someone isn’t skewing the results of the review by presenting multiple favorable reviews…especially on a one-time or infrequent type of service.

I find the Better Business Bureau information more helpful than social media reviews…and less time-consuming.

Business owner perspective

I prefer to ask customers for testimonials rather than social media reviews. When a customer says something favorable about my offerings, I ask them if I could send them a written version of what I heard and, if that meets their approval, that I could use it in my marketing materials. I have yet to have a customer say no.

The reasons why they readily agree are:

• They’re happy with my offerings.
• They want me to be successful so that I can continue to serve them.
• I’m doing the work of capturing their comment in the form of a testimonial…saving them the work that creating one involves.

Takeaways

As a consumer, be careful in relying on social media reviews. They can be skewed by multiple reviews from the same customer. A negative review may have been locked in because the business owner didn’t realize that responding to a social media review made the review no longer editable by the customer even though a satisfactory solution was achieved.

As a business owner, keep in mind that there are some people that you simply can’t please. Don’t allow an occasional bad review alter your offering unless the insight you gained helps you improve your offering.

In the case of my protégé, I would not have altered the item description simply because one customer, out of all the customers served over the years, had not carefully read the description.

Reviews can be helpful, but they have to be examined carefully.

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