So, it has been a while since I wrote, with good reason. It has been a truly crazy time but we're hopefully through the other side. Which means now I can turn my attention back to business and to occasionally commenting on the frustrations and triumphs of running a small business.
Today I want to write about Review Centre, as a warning for other companies. Now, I have often wondered the extent to which reviews are reliable, either because the person writing may not share your perspective on life and reason or, as we saw last week with Orlando Figes, because a lot of the time reviews are fabricated nonsense written by competitors.
This brings me neatly to Review Centre, with whom we have a real problem. You see, we have two categories of people who enjoy flaming us on Review Centre:
- Competitors (obvious reason)
- Customers who have learned that using social media as a method of blackmail is an excellent way to elicit a refund, whether justified or not.
Let's be super clear here: if we think a customer has a genuine reason to be upset, we deal with it very quickly. We wouldn't still be trading after 5 years and a terrible recession if that were not the case.
Anyway, after these reviews were posted I wrote a response to the genuine customer which explained how we dealt with her situation. I then checked with customer services who confirmed she had actually been handled correctly and was successfully in touch with her tutor. I wanted the world to see that we did deal with these kind of customers. I also invited some of our tutors to also post some genuine reviews to balance the negative impact of these reviews.
Amazingly, there is no verification process - so, with Amazon you have to at least buy the book to comment on it. At eBay you have to try the trader to comment on them. At First Tutors you have to buy the tutor's details to comment on them. At Review Centre you have to give an email address and then you can say whatever you like and they'll publish it for you. So, erm, not open to abuse at all then. "Speaking from experience" is their slogan, but "Talking utter crap" would work just as well.
Review Centre then removed my review and that of our actual customers because someone complained. Well, I wonder who that could be?
So now, we only have negative reviews. The moral of this story? Avoid Review Centre like the plague and trust nothing you read there.
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