The s

- tendency towards positive reviews,
- consumer need for balanced, even negative, feedback, and
- concerns over ‘legit’ reviews (both from a business and consumer perspective)

it really does seem to me that the five star system isn’t the best vehicle for consumers to get insight into businesses, their services or products. Question is then, what’s a better alternative?

I can say from user research that I’ve been involved with at frog design that people are definitely suspicious of sites that lack negative reviews, but from what you are saying they are contributing to the bias! From my own experience I can say that I’ve predominantly written about products I like rather than dislike, so I guess I’m not helping either…

But what’s interesting is that this goes against conventional wisdom in retailing that an unhappy customer will tell many more friends about their bad experience than a happy customer will. (e.g. http://tinyurl.com/7dt8ng )

Who knows how accurate that is or ever was, but the contrast is striking. Perhaps the level of effort required to post something online screens out the casual complainers who would otherwise bring it up in the normal flow of conversation.

We use shopping.com’s customer rating tool, with a button on our checkout. Customers rate our service then submit another follow up review a week later when they get emailed.

We find it works pretty well and proudly display our badge at the top of our homepage (even though we no longer use SDC for leads). I guess the challenge is people wondering if the ratings are legit. It’s a tough one to get around. Some people also think that we write the positive feedback that we put on our feedback page: http://www.arenaflowers.com/customer_feedback

We put that up there totally unedited and untidied up on purpose – we feel this will help people believe it’s real. To write in a zillion different styles, with distinct capitlasations, spellings, grammar, idiom etc would be very difficult so (hopefully) it’s more convincing that these are real comments. In any case, we wouldn’t have the time to make this stuff up!

Merry Christmas!

As you rightly point out Ivan, the research indicates that we are likely to respond after having a positive experience than a negative one, and we as consumers are therefore more likely to provide a positive review if prompted.

However, I seem to recall attending some research on buying behaviours earlier in the year, where I saw those participating stating that they would look more favourably on sites/products that have both positive and negative reviews – a far more balanced view and one that can be trusted.

So whilst we don’t like providing negative feedback about a product or service, we actually like to hear both sides of the story.

The challenge it would seem for any business or consumer review site, is to somehow encourage the negative as well as the positive.

But since in the U.K we don’t like to complain, we just tend to vote with our feet – we need to be somewhat creative in obtaining the true feeling of our consumers!