The deceptive power of online business reviews

business reviewsAccording to a survey conducted by Dimensional Research, 90% of customers say buying decisions are influenced by online business reviews (click here for full article). Prior to any purchase, however large or small, customers thoroughly research the product and the company thus basing their purchasing decision on the online reviews. The problem is that online reviews don not present complete profile because not every customer that purchased a product leaves a review.

According to Harvard Business Reviews (click here for full article):

  • 25% of customers are likely to say something positive about their customer service experience.
  • 65% are likely to speak negatively about their customer service experience.

The human nature is that we expect an excellent product but would not take 5 min to let the company know how much we enjoyed the product. At the same time, if product falls short of our expectations (however unreasonable they might be) we would spend an hour letting everybody know how disappointed we are. According to Dimensional Research survey, frustrated customers are more likely to share customer service experiences today than they were five years ago. There is no data showing the same increase in the sharing of the “positive” experience.

In addition, online reviews do not take into account reviewer’s demographics. For example, 18-year-old male and 60-year-old female would have very different expectations of the same product so they would leave highly contradictory reviews.

These results in the misrepresentation of a company because there is no way to estimate how many satisfied customers enjoyed the product vs how many customers did not enjoy the product.

In our 19 year experience, only 1 out 50 happy customers would let us know they enjoyed the service by sending an email or calling our office. And only 1 out of the 100 satisfied customers would go online to leave a positive review. While 10 of 10 dissatisfied customers would call/email our office and leave negative online reviews.

 

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