The Review I Nearly Left, and Then Didn't
I stood in a car park in Bedminster with my phone in my hand and the review page open, and I did not write it.
The order had been wrong twice. I had waited twenty five minutes for something that takes four. Nobody had said sorry, or really said anything, and I had walked out with the wrong lunch and the distinct feeling of having been a mild inconvenience to everyone.
So I opened the page. I got as far as one star and an empty box, and then I closed it.
The sums people do before they post
Three things go through your head in that car park, and they go through everybody's.
How bad was it, really. Twenty five minutes and a wrong sandwich. Not a ruined day. By the time you are standing outside, the annoyance has already dropped a notch, and one star for a sandwich starts to look disproportionate.
How will this make me look. This is the big one and almost nobody says it out loud. A public review has your name on it, or half of it, and a photo. You are not just rating a shop, you are performing a bit of your character in front of anyone who ever looks. Nobody wants to be the person who writes paragraphs about a sandwich.
Will they know it was me. In a city like Bristol, in a neighbourhood shop, the answer is often yes. The person who served me looked about nineteen. If I put a permanent one star on a business with forty reviews, that lands on her, and I will probably walk past her on that street again next week.
So I did what most people do. I decided it was not worth it, and I have not been back since.
Which is why your bad reviews are not a sample
Think about who gets past all three of those. Someone who was genuinely, seriously let down, badly enough that the annoyance survives the walk to the car. Someone who writes reviews as a habit and has no self consciousness about it. Or someone with nothing social at stake, passing through, never coming back.
That is your negative feedback. The far end of the distribution, and a handful of people for whom leaving reviews is simply a thing they do.
Everyone in the middle, the mildly disappointed, the ones who waited too long, the ones who thought the price had crept up, they are not in there at all. They are not silent because they were fine. They are silent because complaining in public costs something, and their complaint was not big enough to be worth the cost.
Make it cheaper to tell you
You cannot make people braver. You can make it cost less.
That means giving them a route that is not public and not a confrontation. A card on the counter with a number to text. A short message the day after, from a person, asking plainly whether everything was alright. Somewhere the answer can be one line and anonymous. None of it is clever, and all of it works better than a survey nobody opens.
And when somebody does complain to your face, understand what just happened. They paid the social cost. They stood there and said an awkward thing to a stranger while their heart rate went up. That is not a nuisance, that is the most expensive feedback you will ever be given, and it was handed to you for free by someone who could just as easily have gone quiet, like I did.
If you would rather something was catching the quiet ones as well as the loud ones, that is what I am building.