Customer Reviews - How Much Can We Trust Them?

According to Google's Zero Moment of Truth survey, the average consumer now consults 10 information sources before purchasing. In today's internet age, reviews offer a simple and effective way for customers to tell businesses what they think about their products and services

Ultimately, they have radically changed the way that we buy and sell, both online and offline. But for businesses of all sizes, there is growing trend for false reviews, left by people with an ulterior motive.

In fact, Amazon has long been a sufferer of fraudulent reviews and despite the company making moves to stop people gaming the system, there's been a massive uptick in the number of fraudulent reviews on the site (ReviewMeta, 2017).

So, can we really trust customer's reviews?

As a business owner myself, I have been on the unfortunate side of false reviews. After a recent negative experience with a potential supplier, I decided to leave a review on their Google My Business Profile. I did so, for two reasons;

1) I found the owner rude and unprofessional.

2) I was belittled for being a small business and not having 1000's of clients.

In response to my review, the owner contacted me in an unsavoury manner threatening "to ruin our online presence for years to come" if the review wasn't removed. In addition, the owner and his associates started to leave false 1 star reviews on my own Google My Business profile despite never being a user of my services.

Ultimately, I felt I had no choice but to remove my negative review.

This leaves me wondering how many other customers have been threatened if their negative review wasn't removed? I imagine I wasn't the only one.

I also wonder what would have happened if I had stood my ground and refused to remove my negative review, how much impact would that have on my own business? Potential customers would be able to see the false 1 star reviews on my Google My Business profile at the click of a button and I wouldn't be able to do anything about it. In fact, I am still waiting to hear back from Google on this issue.

It's evident this is a growing problem. Sites like Feefo only allow genuine customer feedback but even the reviews on there could be easily faked.

As a society, we rely heavily on other people's opinions but most of the time we have no clue if their opinions are true or not.

So, should businesses continue to allow customers to review their products? Or should Google & other sites allow businesses to dispute false reviews before they are published?