The psychology of writing and responding to online feedback By Natasha Keary
The average consumer spends roughly 14 minutes reading online feedback before making a purchase decision and expects to scroll through at least 40 reviews each time. Faced with this swamp of information, our brains have developed shortcuts and biases to help us avoid illegitimate reviews and make informed decisions. Getting to know these cognitive shortcuts leads to a better understanding of the science behind star ratings and the people behind the comments.
Why are reviews so important to us? It all leads back to word of mouth (WOM), a traditional cornerstone of social influence. If a close friend calls and gives you a glowing review of the new cauliflower-based pizza, it’s likely that you’ll want to try it for yourself. WOM is one of the most powerful ways of influencing a decision — according to Nielsen, 92% of consumers believe recommendations from friends and family over anything else.
This tradition boils down to social proof — a term coined by Robert Cialdini in his 1984 book, Influence. Cialdini describes the psychological act of copying another’s behavior in order to act and react appropriately. You see evidence of social proof everywhere in daily life. It’s behind thinking, ‘I must try that restaurant’ after noticing it consistently has a queue outside and making a questionable fashion choice after your friend says they ‘absolutely love it’. All in all, we like to use others’ experiences of others to inform our own decisions — and who can blame us.
During the rise of the internet, review websites emerged for everything from attorneys to company culture to vegan dining. Queue the dawn of electronic word of mouth (eWOM), bringing with it a supersized portion of social proof. Nowadays, 93% of consumers use online reviews to inform their purchase decisions, and 91% of 18-34-year-olds trust online reviews as much as personal recommendations. What could possibly go wrong?
Just under a decade ago, TripAdvisor was investigated by the Advertising Standards Agency (ASA) over the rising number of fake reviews on its website. The travel company subsequently changed its slogan from ‘Reviews you can trust’ to ‘Reviews from our community’.
While eWOM continues the word of mouth tradition, it brings with it a host of new dangers. It’s far less likely that family or friends giving us recommendations in person are being paid to do so or are secretly fake news bots. On the other hand, between 30-40% of online reviews are estimated to be fake. So how do we, as consumers, tell a legitimate review from an illegitimate one? Research shows that we’ve developed a number of biases to help us cut through the noise.
There’s something fishy about a product with five stars but only a few reviews. If it’s not a bot, friend, or freelancer, it might just be an employee giving their own company some love — The Wallstreet Journal reported an employee leaving multiple five-star reviews on a range of upmarket espresso machines that his own company produced.
According to research from BrightLocal, we only begin to trust a product’s star rating once it has over 40 reviews. This golden number is the difference between feeling validated in making a purchase and looking elsewhere.
It never seems like a good thing when the bad reviews roll in. However, research shows that negative feedback helps us to assess the legitimacy of a company. 68% of consumers trust reviews more when they see a range of positive and negative feedback, whereas 30% of potential buyers report becoming suspicious when they can’t see any negative reviews at all.
A study by Brent L.S Coker concluded that the order in which reviews are presented hugely affects our final judgment. If positive reviews come first, we’re more likely to go away with a positive evaluation, whereas if negative reviews come first, we’re likely to be dissuaded entirely. This links back to prospect theory in psychology.
The premise is that ‘losses loom larger than gains’ or people tend to focus more on negative experiences than positive ones. This means that a negative review stays with us — even if the subsequent comments are positive.
Online feedback is a useful way of finding out someone’s experience first-hand. But thinking of this as a one-way interaction is misguided: 89% of consumers nowadays read businesses’ responses to reviews, and businesses who don’t reply earn 9% less revenue than average. That means that review sites should be thought of as spaces for conversation and relationship building. So how do you reply to reviews — especially negative ones — without coming across as dismissive or robotic?
Reading about someone’s experience and understanding their experience are not always the same thing. Responding to negative reviews with questions leads to a greater understanding and a greater likelihood of remedying the problem.
In linguistics, the concept of empathy refers to how someone’s sentence construction shows their point of view or perspective. Linguistic empathy is behind the difference between the sentences ‘I fought him’ and ‘he fought me’. In the first place, the onus is on ‘I’, and in the second, it’s on ‘he’. The concept is useful to bear in mind when writing review responses.
Placing the onus on the reviewer isn’t likely to make them feel heard and understood. This is the difference between:
We’re sorry to hear you had a bad experience.
And;
We’re sorry we missed the mark this time.
There's a reason why your gut instinct is to choose a company with a lower average star rating but a higher number of reviews. There's a reason your brain bets on a business that responds to reviews to deliver better customer service.
The ticket to standing out in the vast world of online reviews isn't a never-ending streak of stars but a healthy portion of good conversation. After all, it was once impossible to receive a review without it. Harnessing the power of online feedback is really as simple as old-school listening and responding — that's what really makes our brains happy. ◆
