I wrote recently about the ridiculous situation of being asked to leave a review for a parking space, but what I encountered yesterday is, I think, an even worse example of review abuse.
Out for lunch with the family, we went to a nice restaurant in Manchester as it was somewhere we had never visited before. The place was amazing; great architecture, wonderful food and decent, if not spectacular, service. All in all, a decent lunchtime, a decent meal and I’d be quite happy to return.
What spoiled the occasion, however, was the final coup de grâce where the waiter who had been looking after us, presented us with a ‘thank you’ card, on which he had written his name. This card had two QR codes printed to allow you to leave a review on two different review platforms.
So far, so good.
What stopped me short was the next line from the waiter, who explained that he’d be grateful if we were able to leave him a review as if we did, he would get a bonus.
Right up to that point I’d have been more than happy to leave a review, but the revelation that his pay depended on it sent alarm bells ringing in my head.
Surely, this is review abuse? Surely, this is completely against the terms of any of the search engines, who rely on EEAT signals to position websites. Is this not also manipulation of AI results, as they too rely on environmental signals to judge the value of a business?
I’ve written before that reviews are supposed to be the ‘voice of the crowd’; an independent and true metric of the value of a product or service. This cannot be true if the reviews are being manipulated like this, hence my longstanding issues with everything surrounding reviews. Google is quite clear that businesses should not offer incentives to customers to leave reviews, but what it doesn’t explicitly state is that you can’t emotionally blackmail customers; perhaps an oversight on their part?
To be clear, I don’t have an issue with our waiter. A really nice lad, probably trying to earn a few extra quid in the summer holidays. My issue is with any organisation who thinks it’s acceptable to try and emotionally blackmail customers into leaving positive reviews, when my real review, as I said above, was that the food was wonderful, service was decent, which in my book get somewhere between a 3-4 star review. Knowing that our waiter needs better than that to keep his job and to get a bonus is just wrong.
I’m now convinced, more than ever, that a counter movement is needed to end this ridiculous obsession with leaving reviews for everything. Clearly open to abuse, it’s high time the practice of judging a business or product by their review numbers was scrapped completely.
