A friend on Facebook recently asked about the relevance of Yelp (and other user-style volunteer) reviews. He said, “To me the content feels like collated, anonymous hearsay.” Of course, the alternative would be the paid professional/political-announcement style reviews we should all be taking with a block of salt in magazines, blogs, television, the internet, and newspapers. Having read and written product and performance reviews since I was 13, when I submitted a whiny little-kid letter to Downbeat Magazine that the editor mistook for a “review” and published it as such, I usually apply more weight to end-user reviews than to “professional” opinions, unless there is technical content involved.
Opinions are, as everyone knows, like assholes. On a weirdly-weighted site like Amazon, I look at the negative reviews first to get the “bad news” over with, then the middle-weighted reviews for the whole picture, and, rarely, scan the paid 5-star reviews to see what the company line might be. I still get misled occasionally, but not as often as I would if I just looked at the overall star-count or read the pointless 5-star reviews.
Lots of people and businesses don’t like the end-user review system, from academics to small business and services to giant monopolies like Amazon. That, of course, doesn’t mean that these reviews are wrong or even particularly effective in affecting business behavioral change. The thinner the skin and the more aggrieved the business response, most likely, the more accurate a negative review probably is.
For example, an acquaintance of my friend wrote, "As a restaurant/bar owner I believe there really isn't a reason for these type of sites. If you are a decent, strong human being, if there is a problem you will always speak in person, in private, to the manager or owner, because you care about the business and you care about its employees that need jobs and you want to see the business do well. If everything is great you can always give a good review on your own social media platforms. . .”
This reminds me of a similar experience I had in a vocational class a few years ago and I wrote about that in “How Quality Feedback Really Works” and I kept beating that horse with "Quality in the Disposable World." I summarized my take on customer feedback, “Small quantity (boutique) production and service businesses don’t have access to actual numbers and formal inspection procedures and if they rely on customer complaints for feedback they are committing business suicide. In fact, the only way a small business can get any kind of information about customer satisfaction is to hunt for it. When someone cares enough about the product or its performance to complain, a conscious customer service tech should take that complaint seriously and to heart. The 1% of your customer base who care enough about your product or their expectations to complain are rare and valuable. If you choose to ignore them, don’t complain when your customer base makes its buying decisions solely on price and delivery. You have informed them through your actions that you don’t give a shit about their expectations and the result is that they won’t care about you or your company’s survival.” But that requires the owner of the business to actually care about something other than convenience and income and that is rare as hens’ retirement plans.
After working for a half-dozen small companies during the first 20 years of my career, I decided to actively pursue Intel CEO Andy Grove’s advice, "Each individual must build the kind of career strength that makes him or her marketable. No matter where you work, you are not an employee. You are in a business with one employer - yourself, in competition with millions of similar businesses worldwide. . . Nobody owes you a career - you own it as a sole proprietor. And the key to survival is to learn to add more value everyday.“ An addition I tacked to that advice was a tactic I ended up needing to pay attention to way too often, “I have no reason to care more about this business that the people who have the most to gain from its survival.” I augmented that rule with “I am not going to make another nitwit into a millionaire.” (In those first 20 years, I rescued three circling-the-toilet companies from their owners’ worst instincts and two of them were sold for a substantial profit soon after I left and one went back to old habits and soon vanished from corporate history.
A slight, but very helpful (to me) variation on that 2nd rule is “I will not be a manager in a dysfunctional business.” My 30-day stint as manufacturing and engineering manager for a trainwreck of a company in Indiana put the nail into that rule that has stuck since. Not volunteering for a “promotion” into middle management freed my energy and time so that, eventually, I was able to put my whole self into three one-man service businesses that I ran between 2000 and 2015 (when I retired the last of those companies) and my paid hobby as a Minnesota State Motorcycle Safety Instructor (from which I retired in 2018).
So, not only do I believe there is some value in end-user goods and services reviews, I think they are a business’ best (and sometimes only) chance to know what your customers really think of you. Ignore them at your own risk. Many have and many have died as a result.
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