Online Reviews and Who to Trust

Posted on 17/06/2013

When you’re looking for your prefect removals company, there will be so many factors to consider that it’s hard to know if you’ve ever made the right decision. With this in mind, it’s natural that many turn to the internet to use independent reviews sites, where previous customers will have uploaded testimonials as to how well each company has performed during their move. With this game of detection, there are flaws to the system, in that there will be differing views and half-truths abound, so you must be pretty careful if you are to use these sorts of site in a useful way. We have some tips and tricks for how to best use online reviews and who to trust when reading them, so get a look in and you should find yourself well prepared to get the best from these sites and find yourself the perfect removals company. Firstly, how to find the best companies. You will be looking to get the companies with the best score out of ten, as this will usually mean that they have had the best scores from the most people. However, you should also pay attention to the number of votes and reviews that each firm has had, so that you can get an idea of the averages that the score is based on. If you have a company who has 45 reviews, all saying that they are just short of excellent, and the score is 9, and a company with one review that just says ‘great’ and a score of 10, then you will be wise to go for the firm with the lower score, but more reviews, as they have a much higher success rate technically. You should also look out for companies with a high rating, but with a load of unconvincing reviews, as these are most likely fake, and in place in order to drive up their rating in general. If people are leaving a load of fake reviews in order to bump up an average, then it is unlikely that there will be a huge amount of attention paid to the reviews themselves, so if they are unrealistically worded, or seem particularly lazy, then alarm bells should ring for you, and you will know to treat the rest of the reviews that may seem more realistic with more attention, or perhaps even to avoid the company altogether. Fake reviews are sometimes extremely easy to spot, but can be a little more difficult, as sometime people are generally a little less than enthusiastic about leaving their reviews, so they may well read as less than realistic. There is no real way to tell, so the best thing to do is go with gut feeling based on how many of these despondent reviews you come across. Negative reviews can also be fake, put in place to put competitors off their stride and decrease their scores, so if you find overly negative comments in amongst other great ones, then you can potentially put the reason down to petty competition. There are also situations that may have caused bad reviews that are not necessarily the fault of the company, for instance, bad traffic may well cause a team to turn up late, so a customer be particularly annoyed, and give them a terrible review because of his bad mood and little else...There are many things to keep in mind when you are looking at reviews sites, but it is usually best to go with your gut on such matters.