Like many local guides, up until recently I have mostly been rating places with leisure activities and restaurants, simply because they felt like the most useful type of reviews for any potential reader. But after finding myself in the situation of purchasing my first apartment and going to the bank, I saw that the bank I visited only had angry customers rating it. It makes sense of course, after all, nobody gives stars after a positive experience for mundane office locations like banks, but just one dissatisfied customer is enough to make the bank look like the worst of the worst. This annoyed me, because if only negative experiences are recorded, then a rating doesn’t properly reflect how the average customer might experience its services. Now I know that the Google maps rating of a bank is hardly the first thing a customer checks when they are thinking about selecting a bank. However, as the impact and economic implications of good online reviews continue to grow, I feel it is important that online reviews are not biased, just like news should not be biased. Online ratings are meant to inform outsiders about how a service or product is perceived on average.
As a result, I decided to rate everything I visit from now on, starting of course, with the bank. But in the long run, maybe another solution is better for eliminating this disparity in online rating and actual service quality. Banks are just one example, and I’m sure there are many more examples of customers giving biased reviews. Maybe we should have a different rating system for certain businesses? A different color? All I know for now is that I want to rate more places and get more people’s views on this matter. So the most appropriate answer to the prompt would be that I love to help make ratings more nuanced.
Cheers
