This past week I watched Battle LA. Now, I’m no expert in movies but I can sense when they’ve gone horribly wrong, especially in the sci-fi genre, and this movie? This movie was bad. Battlefield Earth bad. But at least I walked in anticipating the horribleness. Why? Because before I went to watch the movie I checked its rating – 34% on the Tomato Meter.
We are a ratings society and we’ve been trained - in fine Pavlovian fashion - to instantly interpret what they mean. A 5-star restaurant means a great meal. Platinum means you’ll probably like the album. A sun means a good day and a cloud means bring an umbrella. Ratings provide a simple way of understanding quality and, ultimately, expected value.
The danger comes when those rating systems start to lose their objective value and our belief is that the ubiquitous ‘star’ rating found on most internet sites is an example of this. For example, on a 10-star rating scale, what does a ’10’ mean? If it means excellent, then what does an ‘8’ mean? And moreover, what does an '8' mean to each reviewer individually? Let’s not even get started with things like '8.3'.
Ratings Customers Need
uknowa’s goal is to help customers hire the right service professional for their job. We’re a bottom-of-the-funnel hiring solution and, as such, our business depends on helping customers determine who to work with in as convenient and effective a way as possible. That's why when you receive online bids from businesses, we provide a simple way to quickly ascertain two important hiring metrics:
- Business Qualifications
- Previous Customer Ratings
Business Qualifications: Bronze, Silver, and Gold Medals
Customers need to know whether or not a business is qualified to do the work they need done and we provide great profiles for this purpose. The medal system itself acts as an indicator of overall profile quality. To obtain each rank, businesses are required to add a certain amount of detail to their profile. For example, Gold medals are awarded only to businesses that have opted to let uknowa verifiy their business information: licences, insurance, HST, etc. Medals give customers a simple, visual way to compare bidders' qualifications that is universally understood.
Customer Satisfaction: Total Reviews and Average Rating
While medals offer the customer a rating of a business' qualification level, customers also want to know about previous customers' satisfaction levels. This is provided using two numbers: the total number of reviews given to a business; and the average rating of all reviews as a percentage. Percentages were used as they are simple to understand and again, universal. Percentage only tells you part of the story, however. For example, a 100% Customer Satisfaction rating could be great, but if it’s only from one customer it doesn’t mean much. That's why we include the total number of reviews as well. In combination, these two numbers provide the customer with immediate, weighted insight into how satisfied previous customers have been.
Ratings that Make Sense
The final step in building a smarter rating system for customers is tackling the two largest problems online rating systems have today: nonsensical rating scales and anonymous reviews.
Meaningful Rating Scales
When rating someone on uknowa, customers only have three choices: positive, negative, and neutral. This is done because customers, when they’re happy, tend to pick amongst the highest ratings. When customers are unhappy, however, they almost always pick the lowest rating. Take a look at other popular rating sites like Amazon and Yelp. A soon as you see a negative review you can bet that a 0 or 1-star rating is beside it. This is because customers are always more sensitive to what they’ve lost than to what they’ve gained. This is something called 'loss aversion' and it’s the same reason why you’re more likely to criticize someone than to praise them. Forcing customers to choose between three options focuses the customer on the core experience and makes uknowa's rating system less arbitrary.
No Anonymous Reviews
Making ratings that are meaningful for customers also requires that anonymous reviews be eliminated. After all, ‘Mary from Toronto’ could just be someone’s sister, aunt or cousin. Unlike other ratings sites, uknowa’s rating system is closed. Customer satisfaction is only calculated from reviews for jobs closed through our site where we are certain that the jobs happened. This helps protect customers from fake reviews and saves them from having to call references on their own.
Rating Our Rating System
Ultimately, when we redesigned we set out to create a rating system that we would use ourselves. Something that was simple and made sense, and something that our customers could really trust in. And while no rating system is perfect, this is our attempt at raising the bar for online reviews to help keep customers safe and to connect them easily and simply to businesses they can trust.
