Retailers have remarkably sophisticated ways of getting information about their customers, and it's increasingly common for the information to be about us as individuals. There's the case where Target's data mining can determine whether a customer is probably pregnant and when she is due. There's Lyft (or is it Uber?) that stores information on how fairly you've paid for the service in the past to allow the drivers to determine whether to pick you up. There's this recent ruling that Yelp will have to reveal the identities of people who left negative reviews for a certain business. So many people rely on Internet reviews for businesses left by other customers to decide whether or not to patronize those businesses, but I wonder how much those businesses are scrutinizing us? How much do they know about how often we return merchandise, or make a complaint, or buy mostly loss-leaders, or review a product, or fill out a survey for a free cookie? There have been rewards programs for years as an incentive for individuals to spend more money, but as individualized data collection revs up might there be more negative incentives, such as denial of service or revealing anonymous identities?
These so-called “customer reviews” are proof that “opinions are like assholes…” Given that many companies actually pay people to write negative reviews about their competitors, they’re suspect from the beginning, and a real impediment to the customer just looking for a good restaurant or place to shop. And Yelp reviews are egregious. Not too long ago I checked out one of my favorite restaurants on Yelp, to find one of these “OMG, like this place SUCKS!” one-star reviews. The waitstaff was slow, the food was cold, yadda-yadda-yadda, when in fact the opposite is true (I go there a lot). The idiot “reviewer” even got the location wrong, claiming it was located a few blocks from the beach, when it’s actually about two miles inland. But he had the name right, and listed some of the dishes, so he was talking about the restaurant I knew. Now, I don’t usually write reviews. And I get annoyed by merchants who send you a follow-up email asking for a review (and then bombarding you with catalogs) when you’ve just ordered one thing. But I felt compelled to give this clown a piece of my mind. Started by pointing out that he wasn’t even sure where the restaurant was, and his “review” should be viewed in that light. Local merchants have a hard enough time staying afloat without these asshats trying to tear them down.
I'm a big fan of reviews. For almost any purchase I'll pop over to Amazon and read the reviews (what's the opposite of showrooming?). Like anything you have to know what you're reading. Don't just look at the stars but actually read the review. Are they docking points for stupid shit or maybe something you don't care about? Then ignore it. Overall the access to more and more information is a good thing, you just have to know how to filter it (or pay for the filter, with something like Angie's List).
One of my wife's brothers is the food and beverage director at a major gold card resort. We write glowing reviews for his restaurants and bars all the time, never having been to a single one of them.
I usually don't take Yelp reviews very seriously simply because you find so many contradictory reviews of dubious veracity. Hell, it's now a booming business to pay companies to produce false good reviews for your company and false negative reviews for competitors.
Guys, this isn't really about customers giving reviews; it's that more and more it's the customer being reviewed.
A lot of this isn't even driven by the Internet. Target can target your demographic just on your brick-and-mortar buying habits. And I'm not saying that this is entirely a bad thing. For Lyft that frequently depends on voluntary 'donations' it's perfectly reasonable for a provider to deny service to someone who's cheated them in the past. But I'm wondering what more will we as customers have to worry about in the future and how behaviors might change as a result of each one of us being under more scrutiny by the stores and providers we frequent.
Probably the openly gay weren't a big enough market. Actually, pru, good thread topic. Good data about patrons buying habits is pure latinum to a seller, no surprise they'd grab it any way they can (bricks and mortar use phone # for tracking, while electronically google racked up a wopping 50 billion in 2012 sales largely by convincing marketing depts).
Just look at the forum for any Movie, TV Show, or Video Game. No matter how good it is and how many people actually enjoy it...the forum will be filled with people proclaiming it the "worst episode ever". I just picture them as The Simpson's comic book guy. On the IMDb forum I use a sig I stole from someone on TBBS (I think it was Dennis Baily). "Welcome to the internet, everyone knows everything, and no one likes anything"
I agree, but what if there isn't? The Yelp issue required anonymous identities to be revealed, but what if privacy rights (including those of private businesses) are later upheld, and some businesses have anonymously critical information on you that they share, for example, with others in their franchise? I think bad reviews on customers would be far less common than bad reviews by customers just because of the nature of the business-customer relationship. But erroneous or libelous reviews on our own conduct might still be something we have to deal with as data mining becomes more commonplace.
Yep, that would be Dennis. Then there are the sites that pester you for reviews - Netflix, Moviefone, Amazon. I don't feel compelled to rate and critique everything I've seen, but I wonder if M&A actually takes all those negative "reviews" seriously, and we end up with crap movies aimed at bored kiddies if we don't express an opinion.
