In today’s increasingly online world, trust and truth are funny things.
In today’s extremely online world, trust and truth are funny things. Every business, politician, and government claims to be trustworthy. That’s why it’s important for all of us to be a little more mindful about giving out our trust. That’s also why we work so hard at Trustpilot to help consumers be informed about their purchasing decisions, so that they’re better empowered to make those decisions for themselves.
But if every review platform is telling you they’re the most trustworthy one on the market, why should you take our word for it? There are a few key things you should evaluate in a review provider so that you can decide for yourself.
Who else is treating them like a source of truth?
Consumers aren’t the only ones needing a trusted source of truth. The media needs sources for every single story they run. It can be very helpful to take a look at who they’re using as sources when it comes to stories around consumer purchasing behavior, fake reviews, and transparency — or the lack of transparency —in today’s world.
Trustpilot is regularly interviewed, quoted, and used as a source by some of the top publications in the world. Like when Yahoo and ABC interviewed our Chief Trust Officer, Anoop Joshi, about the cost fake reviews have on consumers and how to be better about spotting them. Or when the Associated Press, LA Times, and Markets Insider covered the Global Coalition for Fake Reviews that we came together with Amazon, Glassdoor, and other review companies to help spearhead. Those are just a few examples of popular publications that have leaned on Trustpilot for our expertise; we've included a more extensive list at the bottom of the article. But the point is that if a review platform is getting treated as a source of truth online by publications like this, that’s a pretty good indicator of trustworthiness.
Is trust simply a buzzword or is it a mission?
Trust is more than just a marketing buzzword to us. That’s why we helped start the first Global Coalition for Fake Reviews with Amazon, Glassdoor, Expedia, Booking.com, and Tripadvisor. We’re joining with them so we can all share best practices for fake review detection and stopping fake reviews at the source, to make the internet a more trustworthy place for all consumers.
We’re also working with them on industry alignment and common standards around customer ratings and reviews, since these types of common standards don’t currently exist. Striving to make the internet trustworthy is an uphill battle that can seem never ending. Our hope is that taking part in things like this coalition will help get us closer to that goal.
Do we hold ourselves accountable to transparency, or just our customers?
So we’ve established we’re working towards a more transparent and trustworthy world with our industry peers. But what do those words actually mean to us? Each year we publish our annual Transparency Report. This report goes into detail about how we operate and safeguard our platform and how we continue to combat fake reviews and misuses of our platform.
It also covers things like improvements we’ve made that year on fake review detection, what percent of fake reviews were caught and automatically removed by our technology, how many needed to be removed manually, and how many fake reviews there were on our platform as a whole. We know there are inevitably fake reviews on our platform that we won’t catch, so we want to be transparent about how we’re working to improve this and what those numbers actually look like. That’s the only way we can get that fake number as close as possible to zero.
Things some of our competitors do that we do not
We’ve talked about what we do to maintain transparency that some other review companies do not. But when it comes to trustworthiness, it’s also important to note some things that other players in the space do that we do not.
Review manipulation
Other review platforms allow businesses to cherry pick reviews, moderate them, and choose which ones they want to display. They allow businesses to choose which reviews will show based on certain keywords, certain sentiment scores, or even human moderation to approve reviews before they’re displayed.
If you look at some of our competitors' sites, they openly advertise their different guidelines about review “moderation” and the control businesses have over which reviews are accepted and displayed online. They don’t really even try to dance around it. That’s because they’re in the business of helping their customers win more customers using reviews, not creating a more trustworthy world for businesses and consumers online. And that’s one of the things that sets us apart.
Closed review platforms
We are one of the only open review platforms. Many of our competitors have closed platforms. This means that if you have a good or bad experience with a business, you’re not allowed to leave that feedback online to help guide other consumers. It also means that they have the ability to only send review invitations to specific customers, giving businesses an alarming amount of control over what kind of reviews they will receive. Even if a significant portion of their customers are having horrible experiences, those negative reviews may never surface.
Your trusted source of truth
It’s worth stating the obvious, which is that if we are one of the only open platforms this means we have a very different mission than some of our competitors. If you’re operating a closed review platform and letting businesses choose who gets to leave a review, you’re essentially offering a marketing tool — a way to only be reviewed by the customers you want to leave a review and win new customers that way. To essentially curate the image you’d like your customers to feel about you and then use that as a tool to drive more sales and win more customers.
For us, the goal of reviews is to create a place where all consumers can be heard, and all businesses can learn from that feedback — whether good or bad — and improve their business for their customers. This makes a better world for businesses and shoppers alike and helps us all make informed purchasing decisions that are the right ones for us. And it also helps our customers win more new customers by building businesses that consumers genuinely love.
Click here for a personal demo, to learn more about how Trustpilot can help your business build trust online.
Examples of some other top publications that lean on Trustpilot as a source or have mentioned us:
