Do reviews work for every industry?

We love to get all up in arms over guest reviews in travel.
We anguish over the supposedly rampant fake reviews and then rally around the idea that the advertising standards authority will fine or destroy Tripadvisor. But perhaps we should step back from our personal feeling towards reviews for a moment and consider why they exist:

Are customer reviews a trend across all industries, or is travel just leading the game?
Why do people actually write or read reviews in the first place?
If they’re all fake,  why does Tripadvisor’s site traffic continue to grow? 

Firstly, what exactly is an online review?

Reviews are essentially the modern-day equivalent of those public customer feedback forms and surveys that accommodation providers used to leave in everyone’s room. They are a way for a customer to respond to their experience of a purchase. Whilst some in-room or post-stay surveys still exist, the shift in technology means that the data and responses are becoming more public by being online.

Why do customers love them?

All the research points to the increasing popularity of online reviews with some surveys internationally showing 69% of people check the opinions of others online before purchasing. Why?

Trust. It’s not that customers implicitly trust strangers; it’s that we don’t trust people trying to sell us things. Ever.

Customers – us, you and me – have been burnt too many times by over-zealous marketing. And there is nothing that pisses a customer  off more than being taken for a ride, misled, having their time wasted or being downright conned.

We’re sick of advertising, we’re distrustful, which means that we look to outside opinion, basically anyone other than you, to tell us what you business is like. We’re looking for those good feelings that advertising used to give us, the confidence that this is a good purchase for us.

What is it that makes reviews so darn useful?

The short answer is that they help customers justify a decision. They play the role of the friend or the salesperson in the shop, who says,” That’s really your colour”, or, “You’ll get so much use out of that bag”.

Making decisions is hard work, so customers constantly look for ways to make it easier on themselves and spread the mental load. Reviews serve the role of making customers feel good about their decision, which is usually made online. As a species, we implicitly don’t want to trust the sales message, whereas a stranger talking about their great experience, is actually enough to help get customers over the line.

So if they’re so useful, why are they not everywhere?

A review is useful when it helps us make a choice. Hence accommodation, movie,  technology and restaurant reviews abound in droves. What about supermarket reviews? Well the reality is, there are only two supermarkets for me to choose from locally, so the choice is reasonably simple and defined by factors other than customers satisfaction – like underground parking, when it’s raining.

The same is actually true for accommodation: if you’ve left your booking to the last minute and there are limited options, you won’t spend a lot of time dwelling or relying on reviews because when there isn’t a lot of choice, they’re not actually helpful.

The other factor in play is the consumer cost. There might foreseeably be a time in the future when you could read a review for the guy making the coffee in front of you, but a mediocre coffee is only $5 lost – a small price to pay compared to the amount of time and effort in the research.

Accommodation is a perfect storm for the use of reviews

Accommodation is a service that you buy, that you haven’t seen, can’t return and once consumed you’ll be left with nothing but the bill.

The closest similarity is restaurants.  If you look at where reviews are most prevalent you can see that accommodation and restaurants are at the top of the list.

Both are items that have multiple competing options, where the customer needs to grapple with choice.; the  cost is significant enough to justify at least some time spent on research;  but yet not so expensive, that we’re prepared to take the risk of trusting the recommendations and experiences of strangers.

But I hate reviews

Reviews are not easy, they’re not necessairly fair and they can be diffcult to manage beacuse they involved indidvdal opinions, which means for many of us – we’d rather than just went away.

Take some hope in that reviews are not – “the be all and end all”, they are still just one deciding factor for customers, but if we can begin to understand the reasons for their popularity and power, we can begin to use them as a force for good – not evil.