Topic: Reviews and corruption (Read 629 times)
It's so sad that no one in this beautiful world is honest anymore, man! I wish I could trust the reviews on Amazon or other marketplaces, but it seems you just have to assume they're all bought, fabricated and fake... Awww man, this is just so sad...
I guess it's just one of the diseases of our time, that people buy good reviews and encourage their customers to leave a good review. It's a well known fact that tons of book reviews on Amazon, for example, are bought. Yet many authors claim that they wouldn't sell a single copy if it wasn't for the faked reviews!
The rules of business have changed since the internet came along, we've always been told the customer is always right and so on, but the reality is now that we have a mostly open society ( at least for us average people ) anyone can talk about anything regardless of what governments or organisations have to say about it.
In an environment like this, honest businesses have nothing to fear
In an environment like this, honest businesses have nothing to fear
I do think that customer reviews are important when deciding whether to buy a service or a product.
I don't think any service or product provider should be afraid of negative reviews. The reason I think they should not be afraid of negative reviews is because if they provide a great service or product, there will be enough customers that will make good reviews, that they will offset the negative ones.
Often you will also see that negative reviews are misguided, where the user simply didn't understand the product or some rules of the service, and complains because it didn't work out in regards to his personal unreasonable expectations
In the cases were a provider of services or products actively try to crack down on negative reviews, I would personally shun that business, as I do think that their ethics is fucked up.
However, I see what I will call corruption a lot of places. For instance, once I went to a hotel, and it was a large poster in every room saying: "If you review our hotel, go to the reception, show the review and receive a fruit basket!"
This is wrong on many levels, and compromises the integrity of the review. There should really be no incentive to make a review, and there should be no reward for making one. I wonder if the front desk would give out a fruit basket if I delivered a scathing negative review of their hotel?
I see also some online services give you discount codes if you review their service with one of the popular review sites. This is an incentive for the user to deliver a good review. What will happen if a bad review is delivered, will there be a revenge from the company if they can identify the customer? Revenge can be subtle, as in providing poor customer service, longer delays for answering etc. That's of course unprofessional, but when done subtle, it can be very hard to prove.
Also, there's a question in regards to integrity of the review sites itself. Recently I received a nigeria-type mail, sent to an e-mail I only had used to register with a certain review site. So either their e-mail database got stolen, or there's a dishonest employee that sells the e-mail list.
I wonder also how easy it is to bribe such review-sites. Here's 10K USD, now please remove the negative reviews about our service! That would make the review site very dishonest, but I'm sure it would be tempting for many running such a site.
So, as a customer we need to trust that the review site is honest and not corrupt, and we need also be aware to not play along with the incentives that the providers are giving to make us post a review.
What are the ways review sites can become most honest and accurate with good integrity? I am sure there's a lot of shenanigan taking place, for instance once I left a rather negative review about a hotel, and shortly thereafter a torrent of positive reviews came in for the same hotel, and what ticked me off was the amount of details in those reviews which normal tourists don't care about, but the kind of info you often read in tourist brochures, like a complete list of all facilitites nearby, the distances to those etc, without adding any personal experiences, those reviews only smell fraud.
I think any provider of services or products should be punished when caught in the act of trying to fix reviews.
What kind of consequences should there be? A complete delisting? A notice about what they have done on top of every review for 6 months?
The problem is that if a business is found to attempt to rig their ratings, then there might also be other issues with the company (what other shortcuts are they making?). At the same time I do understand the need for a company to build a 'reputation', and it can be tempting to kick-start this manually by posting fake reviews.
Companies who without a trace of doubt agressively goes after negative reviews however, should clearly be listed as such on review sites.
The problem then is perhaps that those companies would go after the review sites, and for the review sites to protect themselves, perhaps they should be operated anonymously only accepting cryptocurrency? And perhaps it should also go decentralized, as one can imagine that an agressive business not getting their way could rattle some feathers to have law enforcement take down the review sites physical servers.
Personally I do think that if you plan on being in business for a long time, you should try to be as ethical as possible, and not only seek to maximize profit, on the road to only maximize profit, there are often a lot of things that gets neglected, things that eventually might ruin your business completely.
I don't think any service or product provider should be afraid of negative reviews. The reason I think they should not be afraid of negative reviews is because if they provide a great service or product, there will be enough customers that will make good reviews, that they will offset the negative ones.
Often you will also see that negative reviews are misguided, where the user simply didn't understand the product or some rules of the service, and complains because it didn't work out in regards to his personal unreasonable expectations
In the cases were a provider of services or products actively try to crack down on negative reviews, I would personally shun that business, as I do think that their ethics is fucked up.
However, I see what I will call corruption a lot of places. For instance, once I went to a hotel, and it was a large poster in every room saying: "If you review our hotel, go to the reception, show the review and receive a fruit basket!"
This is wrong on many levels, and compromises the integrity of the review. There should really be no incentive to make a review, and there should be no reward for making one. I wonder if the front desk would give out a fruit basket if I delivered a scathing negative review of their hotel?
I see also some online services give you discount codes if you review their service with one of the popular review sites. This is an incentive for the user to deliver a good review. What will happen if a bad review is delivered, will there be a revenge from the company if they can identify the customer? Revenge can be subtle, as in providing poor customer service, longer delays for answering etc. That's of course unprofessional, but when done subtle, it can be very hard to prove.
Also, there's a question in regards to integrity of the review sites itself. Recently I received a nigeria-type mail, sent to an e-mail I only had used to register with a certain review site. So either their e-mail database got stolen, or there's a dishonest employee that sells the e-mail list.
I wonder also how easy it is to bribe such review-sites. Here's 10K USD, now please remove the negative reviews about our service! That would make the review site very dishonest, but I'm sure it would be tempting for many running such a site.
So, as a customer we need to trust that the review site is honest and not corrupt, and we need also be aware to not play along with the incentives that the providers are giving to make us post a review.
What are the ways review sites can become most honest and accurate with good integrity? I am sure there's a lot of shenanigan taking place, for instance once I left a rather negative review about a hotel, and shortly thereafter a torrent of positive reviews came in for the same hotel, and what ticked me off was the amount of details in those reviews which normal tourists don't care about, but the kind of info you often read in tourist brochures, like a complete list of all facilitites nearby, the distances to those etc, without adding any personal experiences, those reviews only smell fraud.
I think any provider of services or products should be punished when caught in the act of trying to fix reviews.
What kind of consequences should there be? A complete delisting? A notice about what they have done on top of every review for 6 months?
The problem is that if a business is found to attempt to rig their ratings, then there might also be other issues with the company (what other shortcuts are they making?). At the same time I do understand the need for a company to build a 'reputation', and it can be tempting to kick-start this manually by posting fake reviews.
Companies who without a trace of doubt agressively goes after negative reviews however, should clearly be listed as such on review sites.
The problem then is perhaps that those companies would go after the review sites, and for the review sites to protect themselves, perhaps they should be operated anonymously only accepting cryptocurrency? And perhaps it should also go decentralized, as one can imagine that an agressive business not getting their way could rattle some feathers to have law enforcement take down the review sites physical servers.
Personally I do think that if you plan on being in business for a long time, you should try to be as ethical as possible, and not only seek to maximize profit, on the road to only maximize profit, there are often a lot of things that gets neglected, things that eventually might ruin your business completely.
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