Consumer reviews can be a great way of helping you decide whether or not you want to buy a certain product, go to a certain outlet or hire a particular service. There are however many things to watch out for when you are reading consumer reviews, one of which I want to talk a little bit about today. Firstly we have to be careful to make sure that the reviews are indeed accurate, as there are a lot of inflated review scores out there owing to false reviews. It is for this reason why we have great sites such as Topconsumerreviews to help us out.
When you do read those reviews it is essential that you pay close attention to certain factors of it and here are some things which you should be considering.
Expectations
It is important to recognize that everyone has different standards and that everyone puts importance on different things. This is a particularly important consideration to make if you are reading reviews for something like a restaurant. If someone writes that they felt the service was bad for example, then it may well be that they weren’t treated like royalty, rather than being treated badly, alternatively of course, they may have been treated badly. The point is that you should always take a good sample of multiple reviews before making your mind up.
Negative Wins
In the case of most people, if you get a product and it is terrible, faulty or just not very good, they cannot wait to take to the internet to talk about exactly why this product was no good. If however you get a great product which does everything that it says it can do and more, there is far less of a probability that you are going to sing and dance about it, because it does what it is supposed to do. This is something consider when you are reading reviews as the online feedback can skew things slightly.
Responses
Something which I am always keen to see on review sites is the business biting back. Having worked in the restaurant game myself I understand very well that they can have bad days, people can call in sick, problems can arise and sometimes the customer doesn’t get the service which they should get. If I read a scathing review for example about a terrible restaurant experience, and then I see the restaurant reply and apologize, perhaps even offering some compensation, then I would still happily go to that restaurant. Equally I like it when a business shuts a customer up after they have unecessarily complained, and fair play to them for doing so. It is important that we do not take every single review at face value, and again this is why it is important to judge by multiple reviews rather than fixating on one.
Consumer reviews can be very helpful indeed at helping you choose which restaurant you go to or which product you buy, just be sure to keep an open mind when reading them.
