Reviews are epidemic. Everything is assessed. People, restaurants, hotels, animal shelters, real estate agents, dating sites, healthcare institutions, cheese and wine farmers – and car salesmen. Every car you buy has a garage or private individual attached to it, which has usually been reviewed by previous customers. The weighted average of the ratings is available on the internet.
Piece of practical consumer information, count your blessings. In the past, warnings against charlatans reached you at best by word of mouth, but more often not at all. A warned person counts for two. Before I go out for dinner or on a road trip, I check the reviews just like everyone else. Either way they give an impression; 4.7 is still better than 3.6. Although everyone knows the catches, such as the efforts of family and friends to achieve a higher score, a high average from a large number of reviews inspires confidence. Generically, this rating system has put both rogue and bona fide car companies better on the map and may have saved many customers a lot of grief.
To be sure, I always look at the one-star reviews first. How specific are the assessors about the nature of the complaints? Was it verifiably wrong? Have they been duped with false promises? Were warranty obligations not met? Did that youngtimer in competition condition turn out to have been damaged after purchase? A company that is bombarded with apparently hard facts more than once has appearances against it.
Or was it vilified by vindictive querulants? It is never excluded. Google can be a pillory. Taking revenge has never been as easy as it is now, and bad faith can cause great harm to entrepreneurs. You have people who already give out one star when, in their opinion, they have not been called back on time. Or because the car was already sold before they could arrive. Or because they didn’t believe that a wiper blade really cost fifty euros. Some garages receive a better rating from loyal customers, while others receive a worse rating from patrons than they deserve. A good garage can accidentally sell a car with hidden defects, shit happens. It may even be that a dubious or too lazy trader has improved his life, because reviews can of course have a corrective effect.
Still, it makes me uncomfortable that entrepreneurs are at the mercy of the public gut feelings of the common denominator. In a restaurant where I like to go, an unpleasant person, I saw it happen, did not want to pay the bill out of dissatisfaction with the kitchen. I recognized his type: a Google terrorist who used the public pillory as a blackmail tool. Coincidentally, as a customer I knew how well the food was cooked there, but in theory this gentleman could have chased me away to another restaurant with a deadly Google Review.
In that perspective, I read with a kind of compassion the icily polite reactions of traders to serious accusations. Even if you feel like they’re in trouble, you feel sorry for them. They are waging an unequal battle against the people’s courtroom. I can imagine that, as an honorable garage owner, I would recruit some friends for a few well-deserved Google compliments after an unpleasant review. A newly started entrepreneur who receives one star after three five-star reviews due to a stupid conflict over an invoice suddenly drops from five to four stars. That is not enough if the competitor three kilometers away scores 4.7. Then that starter loses customers, even if he is the best professional in the area. The stars shine mercilessly.
– Thanks for information from Autoweek.nl