The Bazaarvoice team
Over the past decade, online review sites have given rise to a new kind of consumer. Our spending decisions are informed by feedback from other customers, and we’re empowered to publicly punish businesses who give us lousy service or subpar products.
But it turns out a lot of reviewers have been exploiting the honor system that lets you leave reviews for products. It’s a black hat approach to promoting a product online, and freelance fakers offer to do it on some sites for as little as five bucks.
It’s not a new problem, but it’s gotten much worse and real users are complaining they can’t trust reviews on sites like TripAdvisor unless they’re verified with a photo of the reviewer.
On Friday, Amazon took a bold step to eradicate the problem. After conducting an undercover investigation and soliciting fake reviews from users it suspected of violating its review policies, the retail giant filed a lawsuit against 1,000 of them.
With this much focus on authenticity, it’s more important than ever for businesses to know how to earn and keep customers’ trust online.
That’s something Austin’s own Bazaarvoice knows a lot about. The company was founded in 2005 to help consumer brands find the best uses for user-generated content to improve their products and overall customer experience.
Bazaarvoice uses software to sniff out suspicious patterns in user content, and employs a human team of moderators who vet 750,000 of consumer-generated content per week.
The company implemented an authenticity policy in 2013 for its clients, who represent thousands of global consumer brands like OpenTable, Lenovo, Dell and SkyMall. The policy lays out ground rules for hosting reviews, prohibiting practices such as cherry picking and editing to misrepresent consumer feedback.
Those clients can display a badge of honor called a trustmark on their site to signal the reviews you read there are authentic.
Dylan Hoeffler is a manager of authenticity and fraud at Bazaarvoice. He applauds Amazon’s effort to deter fake reviewers and start a conversation about authenticity, but he says business owners have a responsibility to take it further.
“It’s all about building trust and confidence,” he said. “First of all, you need to make a public pledge that you care about authenticity. Let your users know you care about ensuring content on your site is authentic and useful to them.”
Hoeffler said fake reviews don’t really help anybody, anyway, because the short-term gain is negligible and risk is so high if you’re caught. The long-term value of a review for a business is really in collecting that feedback to improve the product, anyway.
As for what will happen next for sites like Amazon and TripAdvisor, Hoeffler declined to make predictions. But Bazaarvoice is glad the conversation is happening.
“With any review anywhere, we want to make sure it’s true and that people are moving toward authenticity,” he said. “We love that. We want customers to trust the content they’re looking at.”
