The False Promise of Five-Star Reviews

I had a spat with a tiler – let’s call him Andy – last week.

We’d hired him to decorate our brand-new kitchen.  To cut a long, long story short, his work was so eye-shatteringly awful that we now have to hire someone else to re-do it.

To cut another long, long story short, I duly wrote a one-star review for Andy’s business, attaching some pictures of the offending work (he’d been given the chance to respond to our concerns earlier, but hadn’t).

Writing that review was a nasty experience, for many reasons.

But here’s what I Iearned from it.

Many people won’t write a bad review for a one-person business

There are lots of reasons for this.

One: when you’ve been brought up on the mantra of “if you haven’t got anything nice to say, don’t say anything at all” (as I was), openly criticising others can make YOU feel like the villain of the piece.  Even when the criticism is deserved.

(Andy did some seriously bad work for us, seemingly without caring about it, yet I still had to fight an embarrassing urge to call him and apologise for my review.  How mad is that?)

Two: when you write a bad review for a one-person business, you are directly affecting them.  It’s not like criticising a faceless multi-national.  This is personal, and that can feel uncomfortable and un-nice; on a par with criticising a loved one.

Three: you may risk certain repercussions.  When I talked about this incident with some of my friends, it turned out they’d also had bad experiences with one-person businesses, but didn’t want to say publicly.  In the words of one, “he knows where I live”.

Plus, as a freelancer whose work is also reviewed online, I’m still slightly concerned that I’ll end up with a one-star ‘tit-for-tat’ response.  I check my own reviews daily, just in case.

Some negative reviews will be removed

My public one-star review succeeded where private emails had failed: it galvanised Andy into making contact.

OK, so it was to threaten legal action rather than apologise… but hey, at least it was something!

I told him to go and do whatever he felt he needed to.  But I could only say that confidently because I know a) how to write a clear and completely fact-based review, and b) how expensive taking legal action is.

If I hadn’t known all that, I might have been tempted to delete the review.

Some glowing reviews are – wait for it – fake!

I know.  Who’d have thought it?

All of Andy’s other reviews were five-star, which played a big part in our deciding to work with him.  This was our mistake.

I’m not saying those other reviews were fake (though on closer inspection one looks like it was written by his wife, and another by someone with the same surname as him). But they’ve made me think about the level of trust I automatically place in good reviews.

By sheer coincidence, I read an article last week about The Shed at Dulwich, a 2017 Tripadvisor top-rated restaurant that wasn’t a restaurant at all; it was literally someone’s old, fox-infested garden shed.  Its owner, a writer called Oobah Butler, had been paid to write fake Tripadvisor reviews in the past, and he wanted to test how far people could be swayed by them.

However, the online success of the ‘restaurant’ got overwhelmingly out of hand, with hordes of people clamouring to book a table.  So, Butler actually opened his shed for one night only, welcoming VIP diners with “microwaveable ready meals from Iceland”.

From the article: “I was terrified, it was horrible. We served them ready meals in a really crap garden shed, in an absolute dive. At any point, I was expecting someone to stand up and say, ‘What is going on here?’ 

But apparently, nobody twigged even then.  “At the end of the night, one (diner) pulled me to one side and said, ‘Is it gonna be easier for us to book again next time?’ They genuinely tried to book again, which led me to the conclusion that people trust online information more than what they put in their mouth.”

Ultimately, I wrote my honest review of Andy’s business because I’d have felt worse if I hadn’t.  Hopefully, it’ll spare someone else from the shoddy work and extra expense we’ve had to put up with…

…and next time, it’s going to take more than a few five-star reviews to convince me that someone’s worth working with.