Avoid Fake Customer Reviews

Customer reviews are a great tool that should be in any business’s toolbox. Unfortunately in the past couple of years customer reviews have been tainted by companies trying to game the system by writing their own reviews or paying someone to write the reviews for them.

According to data-mining expert Bing Liu, approximately one-third of online consumer reviews are written by marketers or retailers, not real consumers.

We have seen physician practices, retailers, service providers (AC, Heating, Plumbers, Contractors) create consumer reviews written by their marketing and pr department and not by real customers. We don’t believe that is good for customers or good for business so we created WhyiLike. We have developed a system that verifies our clients’ reviews with unique identifiers that will tell us if a review is written by a real customer of the business.

Each customer has a unique story to tell about a business’s services or products and those stories should not be altered by the business. We have found that businesses that allow their customers to spread the word in a positive, sometimes negative way, see much more success than those who fabricate reviews.

Real customer reviews are not perfect. There will be grammatical issues, misspellings and they sometimes may even be hard to comprehend. That is okay because it helps tell your story by people who have experienced your product or service. They are real and that is good.