The CMA begins the reviews crackdown

As promised, the Competition & Markets Authority ('CMA') has begun its action to make reviews more useful for consumers. They wouldn't use the word 'crackdown', but make no mistake: they are responsible for the changes to the law last year and for the legal action that will follow if businesses persist in non-compliance.

Action to date

Regular readers will be familiar with the CMA code; it has been in effect for over 10 years and already bans selectively inviting reviews and gating (more on these two later). The CMA's latest move - on fake and incentivised reviews - is covered in this webinar...

...which you are welcome to watch. For those without the hour to spare, we summarise it here:

Businesses that invite, host or publish online reviews must

• Take reasonable steps to ensure that the reviews are written by genuine customers
• Not knowingly host fake reviews
• Not knowingly host incentivised reviews without making it clear that the reviews in question were incentivised
• Must not make the incentive conditional upon a positive review

HelpHound welcomes this and any action flowing from it in terms of enforcement. The CMA has already taken enforcement action against several businesses, and it has secured promises from the two biggest players in the reviews sphere: Google and Amazon, that significant resources will be put in place to detect and eliminate fake and incentivised reviews.

But the CMA acknowledges that this is just the beginning; it understands that, going forward, online reviews, relied on by so many consumers, must be reliable and genuine, and that they are not unfairly manipulated by businesses.

HelpHound's opinion on the above, and on the next steps we hope the CMA will take

This is a good first step. Fake reviews help no one, not even the business that may notionally benefit at first; they are too easy to identify and trace. If you have any doubts about this, please read Grizzly Research's recent report and see just how easily they identified fake reviews.

We would also like to see a complete ban on incentives. We consider that any incentive to write a review must come with a clear, if unspoken, implication that the business in question is looking for a positive review.

Going Forward

As you might imagine, we have quite a shopping list. This is borne of years of hands-on experience of inviting, moderating and just plain reading online reviews; not to mention watching - intently - the evolution of various review platforms, from the giants of Google and Amazon, the specialists such as TripAdvisor, Booking.com and the trades-specific sites, to the generalist review sites such as Yelp and Trustpilot that set out their stalls to attract businesses, both large and small, with their own 'solutions'.

Here it is:

 

Concerns

 

This business has over 8 million customers in the UK, but 32 reviews on Google

The same business has over 65,000 reviews on Trustpilot 

1. That a significant proportion of 'big business' has learned that using (and by 'using' we generally mean 'paying') a third-party review website to invite and host reviews can 'wash' its reputation on Google and provide great marketing ammunition at the same time. Businesses will pay good money for the 'right' to post four and a half stars, no matter the colour.

Plain English: Invite all our customers to write their review to the XYZ review site, and they won't write a negative review where it really matters/hurts (because it will be significantly more visible): on Google. 

HelpHound's suggested remedy: that businesses be made to answer a simple question: why do you not direct customers to Google? Where their reviews will be seen and read by the overwhelming majority of consumers and, wait for it, there is no charge! 

 

Another large business's take on reviews. 'Why not Google?' we ask. The staff member's comment 37 seconds in is instructive.

2. Many businesses, often large quoted businesses, have realised that a customer review rating a short telephone conversation carries just as much weight, when it comes to calculating the business's crucial star rating as a review of a lifetime's experience of the same business. 

More helpful to the business than its potential customers? Yes, we would say so

 

Plain English: some business's listings are flooded with such low-value reviews. Do they help consumers? We doubt that. Do they augment the business's headline score on the reviews site? Definitely. If a business is asking for reviews by push text/SMS or a QR code it is generally proof positve that all they really want is the customer's rating; they are not interested in review content. Consumers, on the other hand, are extremely interested in valuable review content.

HelpHound's suggested remedy: that sites are made to insists, as X aleady does, on a) a minimum numer of characters per review (140 will do to begin with) and to differentiat between reviews of the business itself and review of an interaction with an individual member of staff. No consumer needs half a million reviews of a business they are considering using. Quality must be prioritised over quantity.

 

 Articles such as this abound on the web

An 'oldie but goodie'

3. That SMEs and many professional businesses are universally flouting the CMA regulations concerning cherry-picking. 

Plain English: staff are routinely instructed - sometimes incentivised - to get nailed-on five-star reviews, and those only.

HelpHound's suggested remedy: Discipinary action by the CMA - fine plus publicity. It worked when estate agents were found to be illegally price-fixing back in 2017, it will certainly work again.

And it took us roughly ten seconds to find this

 

4. That a significant number of businesses are gating, commonly using e-questionnaires.

Plain English: nothing to add to the above.

HelpHound's suggested remedy: Discipinary action by the CMA - fine plus publicity. 

Examples of businesses only showing glowing reviews on their websites abound

 

5. That a significant number of businesses are flouting the CMA regulations concerning publishing reviews: commonly by choosing to show selected five-star reviews on their websites.

Plain English: as above

HelpHound's suggested remedy: CMA fine plus publicity (perhaps a warning in the first instance).

 

Aside from the fact that we might not agree that a business rated at one or two stars by nearly a third of those who have reviewed it should be described as 'Great', this review site justifies scoring the business at 4.1 (Google and HelpHound and every other site on the web, would score it at 3.7!).

6. That some third-party websites are flouting the spirit of the regulations, at the very least, by favouring businesses that pay for their 'additional services'; an example: businesses that pay the third-party site to invite significant numbers of reviews over a given period have their score weighted in favour of recent reviews, meaning two businesses with the same number of reviews and/or the same individual review ratings, can recieve markedly different scores on these platforms.

Plain English: businesses that pay for add-ons - specifically the right to invite numbers of reviews per month - score significantly better than those that resist the review site's sales pitch.

HelpHound's suggested remedy: methods or scoring must be unified. Outliers such as Trustpilot must be made to conform the the norm (that norm being a purley arithmetical average as used by every other site on the planet)

This is the listing for a nationwide group of veterinary practices on Trustpilot. It scores 4.4 out of 5 from over 8,000 reviews. It is rated 'Excellent' by Trustpilot, Trustpilot's top rating for businesses. But let's do what we bet an infinitesimally small proportion of the business's potential customers/patients will ever do: click on the box...

...and what do we see? That 35 per cent of those who have left a review (after being invited to do so by the business - a paying Trustpilot member) rate the service they and their pet received at just 1*. 'Excellent'? And its purely mathematical score if these numbers were on Google, or any other site? Just 3.4! If anyone reading this article agrees with Truspilot's description of this business as 'excellent' please leave a comment at the bottom of this article. 

7. That review platforms use subjective terms to describe businesses; examples include 'excellent' and 'great'.

Plain English: would most reasonable people describe a veterinary practice where in excess of one in three reviews rate a business such as the one above as 'Excellent'?

HelpHound's suggested remedy: subjective descriptions such as these should simply be outlawed. Consumers are intelligent enough to amke up their own minds if provided with the correct information and statistics.

 

Nearly 3,000 reviews of Trustpilot on Reviews.io

And nearly 400 reviews of Reviews.io on Trustpilot

8. That review platforms host many hundreds of questionable negative reviews of rival platforms on their sites.

Plain English: both common sense and experience dictate that the overwhelming majority of these reviews are of questionable origin: real people simply don't write reviews of review websites, certainly not in the volume you see above.

HelpHound's suggested remedy: moderation, again. Proper moderation would query just about every single one of the reviews posted on either of these sites. 

Conclusion

The above describes 'phase two' of what we consider to be the CMA's priorities regarding online reviews. With over 90 per cent of consumers currently consulting reviews before purchasing goods or a service, it is critical that the manipulation of consumer opinions - by the review sites and the businesses - as detailed above is addressed, and speedily. 

Without such action, consumers will begin to lose faith in online reviews, which would be a great loss to all of us, both business and consumer. And before the inevitable cynics say 'No great loss', may we refer them to this single review amongst billions all over the web...

...you may not need reviews of your local McDonald's to be 100% reliable (although McDonald's almost certainly would like them to be), but medical practitioners, financial advisers, lawyers and other high value servies? We rest our case.