If an individual has a bad experience, they might leave immediately and probably give the business/product one star.All three of those reasons affect the integrity of the rating system. Or if they were incentivized to do so in some way. Many people only go through the effort of leaving a rating if they had either a really good time or a really bad time. And boy, do online ratings bring out the extremes. The same goes for both positive and negative reviews.
How many times have you heard the phrase “the squeaky wheel gets the oil”? This is usually said to mean that any opinion, voiced loud enough, can look like it is much more widespread.
A single bad review can mean the difference between staying afloat and closing their doors for good. Not to mention, their market share and influence will naturally be larger than a business that is just starting out - which means they need ratings in the first place!įor a small local business, every review and rating is gold. Any single review doesn’t carry much weight because it’s mixed in with hundreds or thousands of other ratings. Large companies have the law of large numbers on their side. One negative review can take a 5-star business to 3.5 stars overnight. While every company has to start somewhere, having fewer reviews means that each one carries more weight. The star rating system especially hurts small businesses. When you’re used to seeing nothing but perfect scores, anything less than stellar seems like a failure. In a world of constant 4.5-5 star averages, even a 4 star can look suspect. I mean, think about it - when was the last time you gave a 5-star review? Was it really 5-star service? Probably not. The idea behind the system is that opinions would be honest if customers knew that every review counts and that their review would have an impact on the business’s overall rating, but it’s too little, too late.
A 4.1 seems like it’s the new 3.5 in some circles, which is unfortunate because it’s so different from what those ratings used to mean. Anything less than those numbers might as well be a one or a zero. We’ve been trained to expect 4.5-5 reviews, no matter what. 5 stars has become the new “average” or “normal” rating, with the lower stars indicating increasing levels of displeasure. But look at any online rating system and you’ll soon see that this is not the case. If all ratings were on a linear scale, then 5 stars would represent the absolute best rating, and a rating of 3 would be average. Inflated expectations: are five stars the new normal?
0 kommentar(er)
