When was the last time you were asked to take a survey?
Was it after you ordered a new product? After you hired a company to do something for you? After you stayed in a rental property?
Rajkumar Venkatesan teaches courses in marketing strategy, digital marketing and AI in marketing. (Contributed photo)
The answer, according to a University of Virginia expert, is probably after all those things and more.
Rajkumar Venkatesan, a 20-year professor of business administration at UVA’s Darden School of Business, explains why there is a proliferation of asks from the service industry and whether they make a difference.
Q. Why have customer ratings and review requests become so common?
A. It improves trust in the process. Even before the internet, word of mouth carried a lot more weight in consumer choice, and the digital environment made it a lot more prevalent and easier. You can access a lot more people online, and information can also be shared more widely. I guess the short answer is people have always been influenced by each other, and the digital medium, through reviews, has just made that possible at scale, with millions of customers at the same time.
You only rate something that you really like or really hate. It’s getting more and more difficult to get people to complete surveys.
Q. Why are businesses pushing so hard for reviews?
A. There is a mad rush toward getting these reviews and ratings and increasing the number of ratings because that can make them more relevant in Google’s algorithm.
Q. Are customer ratings effective?
A. In many cases, yes. Reviews help build trust, especially in businesses such as Airbnb, where strangers are interacting with one another. However, ratings are most useful when they provide meaningful differences between options. When nearly everyone receives a high rating, their value to consumers diminishes.
It all depends on the context. I think there’s some data on this … most Uber ratings are like 4.8 and above, so there really is no way to discriminate the ratings. So then, how is the customer going to use that information to make a decision if everybody is highly rated? Then there’s the whole question about fake reviews, and that’s why firms like Expedia and Amazon note if a review is from a verified purchase. It’s digital word of mouth.
