You may have heard of Angie's List on the radio or in TV commercials. Angie's List is an online service where customers can read reviews of local businesses.
Businesses listed on Angie's List do not pay to be listed. Since consumers are paying to find local businesses, it's a reverse of the traditional online review model. The system is set up to allow consumers to help each other find (and avoid) businesses based on real experiences consumers have had. Businesses are graded A-F and tend to be small businesses in the home repair/home renovation, auto and health professional industries.
Yet some small businesses say the service isn't really worth it. These companies say either they don't get enough leads from the site or they don't trust the review process (even though Angie's List bases itself on providing quality reviews).
For Angie's List, members (consumers) pay a fee for the right to rate service providers and access other members reviews on the website. Members can only write one review per service transaction. Non-members can also write reviews (but have limited access to the site). The site will not accept anonymous comments.
The paywall helps to avoid negative comments from casual yet angry consumers who wish to do "drive-by" angry reviews that are the hallmark of publicly accessible review sites. Micah Solomon, a customer service and marketing speaker, strategist, and author of High-Tech, High-Touch Customer Service says, "The old rule that you can never win an argument with a customer is true times a million online. If you're arguing in public you can also lose the affection of everyone else who is watching the exchange."
Like many other popular review sites, Angie's List engineers work to prevent fraudulent reviews by competitors and ex-employees holding a grudge. But like all sites that work to algorithmically detect fraud, it's not perfect.
Angie's List only allows businesses that are B-rated or higher to advertise. They cannot buy their way to raise their ratings or search listing.
Mario D. Vaden, a certified landscaper and certified arborist, who runs his business in the Portland, Ore. area, has been on Angie's list since 2010. While he has gotten some business from the site, he says what concerns him is that he may actually be losing business based on reviewers giving companies higher ratings than they actually deserve.
"You're gambling because you're taking opinions from people that don't know enough to really know if what they think is good is really good. In some areas they can be correct," like customer service, billing, friendly workers, etc., but when it comes to skilled technicians, it's too subjective, Vaden says.
"My experience of knowing some companies on [Angie's List] - some of them I'm on good terms with - and based on my knowledge and technical expertise I could see it having a lot of risk to the customer," he says. Vaden does not pay Angie's List any fees.
This could also be true in terms of reviewers who may hold a grudge.
Vaden says this happened to him. While most of his reviews are positive on the site, he received an "F" rating from a customer who he had some initial conversations with, but in the end with whom he did not do business.
According to Vaden the customer wanted a landscaping estimate from him, but when she told him she was getting estimates from other landscapers, he wanted to ensure his competitors were in fact state-licensed landscapers. Vaden said that rubbed the customer the wrong way and they parted ways. The woman ended up writing a poor review of Vaden's company and submitted excerpts of their emailed conversation to prove her point. Vaden responded with the rest of the email to prove his case.
Vaden says because of that review his rating has been lowered.
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