We live in a world where trust is a rating out of 5. From travel to dining to where you stay. When we went to Europe last year, our daughter recommended that we use the Google rating out of 5 to determine where we ate. It was extremely useful. It didn’t matter if it was for a fine dining restaurant, a pizzeria, or a sandwich shop. We had a rule that it had to be 4.5 or better. It became the most important factor in choosing where we went.
On a couple of instances, we forgot to check and went to a place because it looked great, and we walked away disappointed. We’d look up their rating and sure enough it was a 3.5 or a 2.9. We were surprised at its accuracy. When we got back to Sydney, we looked up the scores of all our favourite places in Sydney, all were highly rated. The system works extremely well. The caveat being that the score needed to have a reasonably high number of reviews, a 4.9 with 10 reviews is not the same as a 4.6 with 1,000.
In business, the way trust and reputation are built may still be based on quality, price, reliability, or service. But the way trust and reputation are communicated is changing for all of us. Regardless of the industry you are in we have moved beyond the simple word of mouth that was the foundation upon which many great businesses were built. Technology results in businesses effectively scaling their reputation as their happiest and unhappiest customers register their experience for all to see.
So, you must earn it. In Melbourne last week, an Uber driver was on his way to pick up my wife and I to take us to the airport. We had just been talking about this topic and she said sometimes the driver will get out and open the door for her and other times not. So, we were particularly keen to see what this driver would do. To our amusement, he remained seated in the car and opened the door by reaching behind himself and awkwardly shoving the door from the inside of the car with a backward push. Does that deserve a 4 rather than a 5 all else being equal?
How should you rate a business? When it comes to Uber, for example, I would be hard but fair. One of the few things I spend money on is the Uber premium service. I expect it to be just that. I give the ranking that is deserved. My daughter would tell me ratings are powerful and giving someone a bad rating impacts their livelihood. But does that mean giving everyone a 5? For a little while after that conversation I did. But the reality is you should be marked up and down for how good your service is. If I give average service a 5 that’s not fair to the person who gives exceptional service and deserves the 5.
I was reading an article in the Australian Financial Review (AFR) earlier this week about retailer Cettire which highlighted to me that rating systems have become so trusted that they are being used by investors to determine business quality. This quote in the article stands out “While investors have made money, review sites are littered with poor customer experiences for returns and refunds”. I couldn’t help but notice comments from a fund manager who didn’t invest saying that they couldn’t ignore the company’s poor review history. Ratings and reviews are a serious business.
Ratings and reviews in their various forms are increasingly relied upon as the source of trust in the global economy. What does this look like in the future as they become increasingly embedded in our daily lives. Do we end up with a consolidated score made up of all our interactions with every service provider we deal with? The point to all this is not to be flippant but to emphasize the changing nature of trust in the modern digital age. Where a rating out of 5 is now the most powerful way in which we both earn and give trust.
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