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Who here leaves a review?
I'm in the top 5% of Google reviewers in the UK, according to those lovely emails they send me. I'm also quite a big reviewer on TripAdvisor.
Who else here leaves reviews? If you do, are you simply factual or comical, a bit of both? Do you do the Positive then Negative, or in reverse? Do you use pics and videos?
Basically, what's your preferred style?
I have mixed feelings about reviews. Short answer: I mostly leave reviews for places that I believe are excellent, and typically individual businesses (not chains). I also try to include pictures.
In the US, Google reviews can be removed by the business. So a lot of businesses who are engaged enough to manage their online presence will delete anything less than a 4 or 5 star. (They could also get rid of 4 star if they wanted.) This makes Google reviews a less reliable metric.
TripAdvisor requires businesses to pay a massive fee if they want the ability to respond to reviews. I believe that amount is $1k/yr. I think this is unfair, but it's obviously how TripAdvisor makes money.
Yelp has already been mentioned, but it's straight up extortion. Plenty of articles about this floating around online.
If we include the concept of internal reviews, where you get an email survey requesting feedback on how a sales associate or other individual performed, anything less than 5/5 will result in a punishment for them. Even if you comment something like "the person who worked with me was great, but the store didn't have what I hoped it would," the individual will receive a stern warning at best, and firing at worst (hopefully not for a single review).
Clearly, the review system is very broken. So what can we do about it? Personally, I try to include pictures in my reviews. As an example, a local restaurant doesn't have their menu posted online, so I took a picture of it and uploaded it with my 5 star google review. I personally try to look through review pictures first, as I think those are a more reliable view into someone's experience.
It has also become important now to not use any negative language in your review, as stupid AI summary generators will pull that in. A comment obvious to a human, like "I went to a few different stores and didn't like their lack of cleanliness, but this one is perfect!" could make it into an AI summary as "people complain about it being dirty."
I also have found that many low-reviewed places end up being a great experience personally. Consumer expectations are a big part of this. Look up any chain burger fast-food place, and you'll find some reviewer saying the burgers aren't as good as some $20 burger restaurant. That's obviously not a realistic expectation.
Finally, I feel a need to comment on how annoying companies have become with requesting reviews. I mainly am directing this to big box stores and other massive chains. If I do a pickup order from a home improvement store, over the next week I will receive at least 3 emails requesting a review of the pickup experience, and another 2 requesting a review for the product(s) I purchased. This constant request for feedback makes me less likely to leave reviews. And when a small business is pushy (in person) about asking me to leave a review, that annoys me as well. A sign on your counter or a kind remark in passing is fine. Drilling me before I leave with "you'll leave a good review on Google, right?" is not acceptable.
Re: front end people being punished
Absolutely. Even if I hate the company I always make sure I'm either refusing to answer a survey or give them full points. It's ridiculous and I hate that the landscape is making us do this, but the fact is that someone else's job or slave-wage-padding-bonus is riding on my clicking 5/5.
Alternatively, I try to remember the name of the staff member for the 10 minutes I'm filling in a survey, and when they ask if there's anything else I mention their name. The company has already budgeting some sort of monetary bonus, might as well have it go to a fellow human worker instead of to some bull---- department pool.
Re: asking for review
I'm happier about the push if they outright
bribeoffer me something for my time. Example: (Atlantic Canadian) dairy queen will give you a free dipped cone for completing customer survey. I click some check boxes and put in my cashier's name and bam, free ice cream. I'm okay with that. What I despise the most are companies offering me nothing, and additionally, punishing their front line staff for not hounding me for my free time. More neutral is the offer for free draw: still cheap I wish they would stop it. Offer me $0.10 worth of your store points at least. It's greedy and insulting.Very good point with mentioning the staff member's name on internal review systems. I try to do this as well!
What frustrates me about small businesses and reviews is that unlike large companies, which might spam requests but won't go much further, I've had experiences with small businesses that seem to outright expect reviews as some sort of social obligation, and actively remember and dislike customers who don't leave them. I don't post public reviews, as a matter of personal privacy; particularly for some small, particularly owner-operated hotels, once the owner finds out that I won't be leaving a review I've gone from enjoying my stay to feeling that I won't be able to return, even if I suggest that I will be privately recommending them.
I don’t travel much, but I’ve often been tempted by the idea of looking and behaving in every way like a real professional critic (notebook writing down my experiences, asking questions about the business and history, ordering a coffee and barely taking a sip before leaving) just to see if I’m treated differently.
Wow. That's pretty awful. Do they expect the same from their 80 year old guests who can barely figure out how to view their grandkids' photos on Facebook?
Not quite the same, but this also reminds me of one time I was calling roofers in the phone book. (I was getting desperate with how absurd the pricing was for most of them.) One of them just answers the phone with "Hello?" and I ask "Is this so-and-so roofing?" They then have the nerve to ask "who's calling?" I should have hung up then, but I told them my name, city I live in, and the job I was looking to have done. They just ask "is this a real job or are you trying to sell me leads?" I was a taken aback, and must have just said "what?" And he repeated himself. I hung up after that.
It's amazing how many companies have garbage customer service, especially when it's a local business.
I can understand the roofers frustration though if his number is out amongst the data resellers and his number is being hit x times a day by "lead generators" rather than customers. They call up and ask for a quote for something as their spiel script, then say something like "wouldn't it have been easier if we had done all this for you?" before pitching their service. You could have called up and been exactly like the pitch. If you're a company owner, this is so annoying and wastes so much time.
From your side though, it's just shit customer service.
Wait, what, lol? That makes reviews completely useless, doesn't it?
Thankfully it doesn't work that way. You can only flag a review for abuse if they violate Google's terms. I'm looking at GMB right now and can confirm there's no delete buttons.
Absolutely. Review manipulation is rampant on every platform. It's just the method of manipulation that changes.
That manipulation is always in a monetary value.
You shouldn't be able to buy good press, but of course, for the right amount, you can.
I leave reviews about 60% of the time when I do something. I always leave the good, the bad, and the neutral when I do. I rarely add humor, only because I don't think I'm that funny and don't want to make a joke that will land poorly and mess up a company's ratings.
Sometimes I add pictures as well, though I like to make sure that I strip the metadata from the pictures I add to reviews so that it can't be tied back to me IRL as much as I can. I don't like Yelp because of the paid good reviews aspect of it used as extortion for companies. But i use Google Reviews, TripAdvisor, Square's review system, Amazon's reviews, and reviews on smaller webstores.
Unfortunately my style is angry asshole, almost all my reviews tend to be negative.
The reviews themselves are generally detailed, and go into exactly why i was annoyed enough to review. I try to avoid attacking the business, but it's definitely something I need to work on more...
On the other hand, I'll leave positive reviews for small businesses if they do a great job occasionally.
I reserve angry asshole purely for calling out companies on Twitter/X, and they are usually utilities or public transport.
I will always leave a review for games on Steam after I've played them. I feel like Steam reviews are super helpful to me when deciding whether to purchase a game or not so I like to give back by adding my own when I'm done. For really good games it's really easy, but for others it feels like a slog, but I force myself to do it anyway because I generally get more use out of the bad reviews than the good ones.
My review style is all over the place, much like my brain. I will sometimes leave a scathing review like when I paid $40 for a cheap knock off cat statue where only the front part of the paint job looks like it was painted by a third grader.
I also gave a five (then four) star review of a pack of underwear, where I took a video of me stretching the elastics to compare the newer manufacturer to the old one. The older set of underwear was more stretchy and comfortable. I had to hold my phone with one hand, stretch the underwear with my other, and anchor both pieces of underwear with my toes. I also used a long ruler to show how far my size would stretch.
When reviewing scents, I try my best to describe what it smells closest to, or how it makes me feel, or what it reminds me of. I use phrases like "mature feminine scent, but not like a salty grandma" for a perfume or "smells like the fireflies in my backyard" for a cedar fragrance oil.
For a recent xmas tree reeses review, I got an image off google of the old size and compared it to the new one to prove the shrinkflation.
Other times, I just can't be bothered because the product either has a review rating I already agree with, or it just isn't remarkable enough. Funnily enough, I just reported four reviews this morning for being fake on a flea/fly trap on amazon because each review had a blank profile and used advertising language, ofc with five stars. You know the kind.
I've left a review maybe once or twice. Similar to my activity here, it's almost exclusively lurking because I have little confidence in my writing skills.
Not having perfect writing skills arguably makes you an ideal reviewer. Sounding human instead of like a snob who might be paid to leave reviews is a good thing!
There's also a trend in social media that says typos actually are good because viewers are more likely to believe you are a human and not a bot. This is one of those things I hate but also somewhat understand.
I concur with this. I like to read obviously human reviews. Once you have used AI generators enough you start to spot the way they write.
Please leave human reviews, warts and all style. We all would rather see them.
I leave a review when I think something significantly outperformed my expectations, when I think something is grossly inadequate or wrong, or of I have unique expertise to inform others.
For negative reviews of services, because it is people impacting, I limit it to when I feel the people involved have knowingly done wrong to my detriment.
I write Steam reviews here and there. The game must be really good or have something done really bad for me to write a review.
Sometimes it's not even helpful review - I mean what should I write abour Age of Empires 2?
Other times my review got up to the top of all time for the given game (Oil Rush) - this specific review goes deeper in as the game had many negative reviews at the time and it seemed people failed to grasp the concept of the game so I wanted to kinda level the odds.
Sometimes I give long reviews, this is mostly when I just start to type and thoughts just keep popping up in my head - modern Tomb Raider trilogy got this kind of review from me.
I also write reviews on e-shops here in Czech Republic as we have two websites that has good integration into e-shops and they tend to use it a lot. I can review the shop and aometimes even the goods I bought. I review shops much more than goods. These tend to be short reviews with pros and cons but they can be very useful as they can be flagged as a review from real customer (if you bought something and got email to review the shop). This helps deciding where you would buy your thing - if you see "gold certificate" and thousands of reviews it steers you toward this shop rather than some other you never heard about and which has 9 reviews.
I don't leave reviews on other things. Sometimes I come up with a review in discussion (like Tildes) when I think it should be said - mainly negative experience though, ie. difficulty to find support for product (some HP notebook 10 years ago), not entirely true marketing (latest being 5.1mm iPad with huge camera bump that actually makes it much thicker) etc.
But I give positive reviews as well in these discussions, I praise Nokia G22 (and likely G42) for it's way of thinking about repairability - you can only change connector board, battery and display assembly, but these are all most likely to fail or get damaged. I have already fixed one when chocolate got into the connectors. Or Steam Deck and its internal build and even kinda encouragement from Valve (that makes it) to open it up and do what you want claiming it's yours and you are the one who does whatever you want with it.
I don't usually leave a review but my photographs are quite popular on google maps for some reason. Lately I've taken to taking pictures of local bus stops and uploading them to the stop in maps and most of them get featured, it's hilarious lol
That's actually quite useful though.
yeh, just not that artistic but I have some ideas 😄
I do. From most likely to review reasons, to least
Egregiously terrible places get reviewed, almost always. As do excellent Japanese/Chinese/Vietnamese restaurants outside of Vancouver/Toronto. (Please everyone go and go don't close!)
Operation hours and menu photos, address correction if necessary. Or brand new places (<20-50 reviews) that are good to quite good.
To amend previous reviews, whether they've become better or worse
Surprisingly good or quite good places, or if I feel like they didn't get a lot of reviews (<500) or rating didn't seem fair. Very likely to leave reviews for even moderately good Japanese/Chinese/Vietnamese food in small towns.
(Not likely at all) If it's pretty meh, but prices are okay.
(Extremely unlikely) if it's a local mom and pop. It's alright, you guys do your thing. I might not come back but I'm hoping others do.
Edit: I'm also quite highly likely to review/survey whatever if I'm being bribed.
I almost never leave public reviews, because I don’t want them tied to my name.
I’m not much of a reviewer, but I’m a “local guide” on google maps — I’ll often submit changes to business hours, or photos of a menu, or road closures, or lane changes etc.
I’ve definitely dropped off in my rate of submissions but there was a time that google ranked me as close to the top for activity/submissions in my local area