On Amazon they began selling milk for $3.99 a gallon. As a result, they got 900 people to rate the milk as very good or outstanding! One rater said that the milk was so good it was "worth its weight in gold times infiniti!" An analysis of Amazon's ratings of books shows that the "average" rating is 4.2 out of 5! When Amazon sold staplers, almost 60% of the raters gave the stapler a 5, with only one rater giving it a 3. Does this mean that there are no average staplers? I don't think so!
When people rate romance novels, for example, they tend to be fans of romance novels. So even a mediocre read is rated good by that audience. How many of us, when we are unhappy, will make the time and effort to find the item on the web and enter a "Poor" rating? If only fans of products are rating them, what happened to the old addage that an unhappy customer tells 30 people, while a happy one tells just a handful? Is that changing on the web?
Are the people inflating scores on the web sincere? There were stories of some companies inflating scores about their products on blogs, etc. Do we trust these scores?
Some companies are using online reviews as measures of the "Voice of the Customer." Is this wise?
We would recommend more traditional surveys, but they have problems as well. What are your thoughts?
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
1 comment:
Seems that people upscale their ratings as well as the media that they say they watch or read. They want people to think well of them.
Post a Comment