The slow and steady emergence of online reviews has brought about nothing but convenience for customers to a high extent; we wish we could say the same about businesses though. While online reviews provide various opinions of products and services and all related dynamics, there are no boundaries to what customers might like or dislike and whether that was part of the product or service to begin with. Unless customers are extremely motivated to try and experiment with new or unrated products, common behavior is adding a 4 star and above filter to product searches and staying clear of those that have negative reviews.
While businesses, especially start-ups, invest a lot of money and hard work in their business and fake and exaggerated negative reviews destroying brands and businesses does not seem very fair. Negative reviews are somewhat important because no product or service can work equally well for consumers, but customers sometimes go overboard and post malicious and damaging information that drive down sales tremendously with no fault of the brand.
With our client, we built a solution to curb the extreme impact of exaggerated negative reviews, and provide some relief to businesses with a just and fair platform.
The idea was to evaluate and validate negative reviews by a committee of esteemed members with due knowledge of market and acquired research on products and services offered by businesses. Residing loosely on the basis of Web 2.0; Information of the people, for the people and by the people; we focused on fair play while designing this Web portal. Removing inappropriate and fake reviews, the committee maintained a just environment for the businesses to showcase their products and services and serve the market better with every passing day.
We designed a community based platform within the social media and Advertising domain that showcased businesses from all industries, both online and offline, small, medium and large to serve convenience to customers and simultaneously allow businesses to strengthen their online presence. While this platform allowed businesses to register and customers to post reviews of their experiences with different businesses, it also provided an option to flag and report inappropriate reviews to discourage users from taking undue advantage of reviewing by posting untrue and damaging reviews.