Giving ordinary people a voice is such an important part of recent developments. Being able to share with others your own experience of a product or a service is so liberating and genuinely useful. Using an online presence you really never know who or what you are dealing with. A schoolchild operating out of their parents garage can be indistinguishable from a multinational corporation. Equally a scam site using a cloned website can be difficult to spot even if you are unusually cautious. To benefit from online you have to be online, exposed. So other users experiences are a vital check. First off is the Site a scam or are products actually delivered, next what are customer services like, do they respond to complaints or throw up a defensive smokescreen then finally what is the delivered product or service like. Is it worth the money or just poorly conceived?
Other users experience are vital then in weeding out those Site just not worth bothering about. The downside is that people are quick to vent their spleen when their expectations are not lived upto, but slow to praise for a job well done and then are often not very objective. So each review site for a product, has a range of high praise with possibly more vehement condemnation. We the readers have to step through this and set aside the more extreme comments, in either direction, and try to arrive at a balanced view. It is usually becomes quickly clear if a product is poor or its customer services does not function.
As beneficiary of others postings, so I have tried to return the benefit. Under my penname of TonySomerset (of Taunton) I have been posting my own reviews for the things encountered. What has become increasingly clear is that not all review sites are equal. Yet another minefield for the unwary to step through. Several sites use customer feedback solely as a means to bolster their cashflow from the product supplier. User reviews are incidentals, to provide a cloak of acceptability, not the primary purpose. They take a rake off from the product supplier for each visit and/or link from their own pages. A vested interest. Beware then, Sites like TopTable, Sugarvine or Ciao are only interested in the cash stream from their client sites so will not post negatives reviews. Their reviews are totally biased, as only good favourable reviews get posted.
As users know full well nothing is perfect, mistake happen and the odd bad days occur. That is not the point. The point is how does the supplier respond and deal with the inevitable problems that do occur. How useful to you is it to know that everything is top quality and only a minor blemish might sneak through as comment. Utterly worthless. What you need to form your own judgement is a balanced picture, the good countered with the bad. You can then form a view, where were the problems and how were they responded to. If just a matter of taste or too high an expectation that can be disregarded. However if the bad reviews pinpoint towards a customer crash course then avoid like the plague. The skill of surviving in business is to leave the customer not dissatisfied. It requires tact and people skills to manage successfully. Not every customer will always be satisfied but if a supplier leaves a trail of them foaming at the mouth, frustrated in getting any response to even a minor point and wanting to vent their spleen, that supplier is heading for disaster. We do all need to know so we too can avoid. So do beware of the Review Site you are using, check it out. Do they only show the positive upbeat spin?
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