5-Star Review Skepticism: Old-Fashioned Way Best to Find Good People?
My skepticism of customer reviews has been growing for some time. I think customer reviews started out well and became very useful to find good people, but have been spiraling down for years for a variety of reasons.
I believe the first reason lies in the sheer ubiquity of customer review requests. If I talk to any person on the phone, I’m getting some combination of e-mail, text, and personal plea for a 5-star review. And it is not just once in a while; it is becoming part of most business interactions. It’s a job put on me by companies and they make me feel guilty if I don’t comply, and comply positively. The volume of reviews has watered-down legitimate performance feedback.
Another reason is how the on-line review system has been gamed. Corporations hire “review help” companies to improve their on-line reviews. They send out surveys to every person that does business with the corporation and then turns the positive, 5-star reviews into “official”, posted reviews. The less positive reviews get scrapped. This has made reviews less and less reliable.
Many reviews border on fantasyland. The 1,000 positive reviews with one company with only a handful of negative reviews? How is that even possible? People tend to be negative! Everyone is so overwhelmingly overjoyed with an overwhelming number of companies? People don’t generally seem that effusively happy to me…
Or how about companies that arbitrate between two parties with competing interests? It would be like reviewing a judge (or a property manager with their landlord and tenant clients!). If a guilty verdict was given, the prosecutor would be giving the judge 5-stars and the defense would be giving the judge 1-star. That makes sense. Now is it possible that both parties think justice was done and might positively review the judge? Sure, it’s possible. But 1,000 times? No one is that good!
If there is one scoop of ice cream left and my oldest son and daughter both want it, how would I always get a great review from both of them? One is going to love me and the other is going to be upset. I figure to get 5 stars from my daughter and 1 star from my son (or vice-versa). Doesn’t that make sense?
So… if on-line reviews are trending to be less and less reliable, where do Charlotte landlords find good people to work on their homes? We are all in need of them!
In the old days, people in need of a service would ask a friend. “Who mows your lawn? Are you happy with them?” There are certain friends everyone has that they know are up-to-date on certain things. They tend to give out the 5-star referrals!
In property management, the same goes for finding excellent vendors and tenants. I’ve always had success when asking our favorite vendors if they could recommend good people in other industries. And when great tenants recommend their friends who are moving into town, I’m almost positive they will be good tenants too before even running their applications. Good, reliable people tend to congregate with people like themselves.
Are on-line reviews useless now? No, but I think they are getting there. I’d argue they need to be taken as a piece of information and handled with a healthy degree of skepticism. I think it is better to focus more on the comments than the star count.
Smart landlords realize that while newer search methods for good people can be moderately useful, old-fashioned methods can be more dependably 5-star worthy.
Happy Landlording!
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