How do you search for a product? The product may be your next car, enterprise database in your organization or finding best re-mortgage rate. Chances are (well, I'm pretty confident) that you search for best deals on internet.
You are most likely to scan three types of sites - viz
1. Each vendors' own website
2. A comparison site (often known as screen-scrappers like money supermarket, froogle etc.)
3. The feedback written by general public (either online or anecdotes from your friends, colleagues etc.)
In pre-internet era (say before 2000 when internet was still few and far between), online feedback sites were rare and so was comparion sites. So, consumers could only gather information from respective company's websites and whatever they claimed in traditional TV, radio or newspaper ads.
The obvious problem was to validate their claims. If they said "according to XYZ survey conducted..." you really not have much scope of validating this claim. You don't really have enough time/resource to find out the research report from library journals.
But now, thanks to online forums, companies don't have space to hide. The best example, is to select a car. Almost all manufacturers have user forums on internet. Before you actually test drive a car, you have access to all the things that went wrong with particular model. So what? Does it prevent anyone buying a lemon or selecting wrong mortgage?
No - of course it does not completely eliminate bad selection, but no doubt it makes consumer a lot more wiser and apprehensive of what to look for.
Companies often claim that for every bad review, there are hundreds of satisfied customers. Yes, it is quite true on some extent. Often consumers won't praise a product often as they criticise it when things to wrong. So, no review of a product can have two meaning - either everyone using it was very satisfied or it sold so few that even those with bad experience, didn't bother writing their feedback online.
What is interesting is that, even today, many big companies are not really taking online feedback seriously. A well known case was "Dell Hell" (search for it on internet). Basically few years back Dell started selling crap laptops and people flooded the web with poor consumer experience. That seriously did a dent on Dell's revenue. Finally companied take steps to raise their quality and pacify the online rants of users.
Now the question which begs an answer is that why companies are still ignoring online citicism from users? It depends. If the company's primary user base is old people - who are not net savvy, they know they won't hit hard as mainly younger generations are glued to net. Many people, often confuse anectodal evidence (ie. my friends car worked fine for 10 years) with statistical evidence (eg. 500 models of same car had a serious breakdown in first year).
There are some agencies, who actually work professionally to improve online reputation of many companies! So, if company A sees that complaints about their product is flooding the net, then they ask for these specialists to counteract the issue. These firms then try to dilute negative feedback with loads of artificial positive reviews. They even employ tactics so that search engines brings up good feedbacks first.
It's a cat and mouse game.
You are most likely to scan three types of sites - viz
1. Each vendors' own website
2. A comparison site (often known as screen-scrappers like money supermarket, froogle etc.)
3. The feedback written by general public (either online or anecdotes from your friends, colleagues etc.)
In pre-internet era (say before 2000 when internet was still few and far between), online feedback sites were rare and so was comparion sites. So, consumers could only gather information from respective company's websites and whatever they claimed in traditional TV, radio or newspaper ads.
The obvious problem was to validate their claims. If they said "according to XYZ survey conducted..." you really not have much scope of validating this claim. You don't really have enough time/resource to find out the research report from library journals.
But now, thanks to online forums, companies don't have space to hide. The best example, is to select a car. Almost all manufacturers have user forums on internet. Before you actually test drive a car, you have access to all the things that went wrong with particular model. So what? Does it prevent anyone buying a lemon or selecting wrong mortgage?
No - of course it does not completely eliminate bad selection, but no doubt it makes consumer a lot more wiser and apprehensive of what to look for.
Companies often claim that for every bad review, there are hundreds of satisfied customers. Yes, it is quite true on some extent. Often consumers won't praise a product often as they criticise it when things to wrong. So, no review of a product can have two meaning - either everyone using it was very satisfied or it sold so few that even those with bad experience, didn't bother writing their feedback online.
What is interesting is that, even today, many big companies are not really taking online feedback seriously. A well known case was "Dell Hell" (search for it on internet). Basically few years back Dell started selling crap laptops and people flooded the web with poor consumer experience. That seriously did a dent on Dell's revenue. Finally companied take steps to raise their quality and pacify the online rants of users.
Now the question which begs an answer is that why companies are still ignoring online citicism from users? It depends. If the company's primary user base is old people - who are not net savvy, they know they won't hit hard as mainly younger generations are glued to net. Many people, often confuse anectodal evidence (ie. my friends car worked fine for 10 years) with statistical evidence (eg. 500 models of same car had a serious breakdown in first year).
There are some agencies, who actually work professionally to improve online reputation of many companies! So, if company A sees that complaints about their product is flooding the net, then they ask for these specialists to counteract the issue. These firms then try to dilute negative feedback with loads of artificial positive reviews. They even employ tactics so that search engines brings up good feedbacks first.
It's a cat and mouse game.
