Booking.com, TripAdvisor, and Yelp consider customer reviews as a crucial part of their platforms. They recognize that reviews serve as an essential factor for customers to assess and make decisions. These platforms heavily rely on reviews to improve the overall user experience and enable individuals to make well-informed choices based on the experiences shared by others. Companies therefore pay a lot of attention to those people that provide negative feedback in reviews either directly or through the third party platforms.
We all know negative reviews can significantly impact business, as it influences perspective and attitudes, resulting in customers’ hesitation to make a purchase (behavior) when they are reading negative reviews, which affects web traffic, purchase probability, and therefore revenue and profit.
Kaheman and Tversky, two Nobel Prize-winning researchers, indicated that negativity bias exists strongly in terms of decision-making. People consistently place greater emphasis and weight on negative aspects of an event or experience than they do on positive ones. This positive-negative asymmetry is prevalent throughout humans:
- People remember negative or traumatic experiences more than positive ones.
- Negative thoughts are more prevalent than positive ones.
- We react more strongly to negative events than to positive ones.
- Positive feedback from the employer is easier to forget than negative feedback.
- Making decisions more based on negative data than positive ones.
- Remember insults are more than applause.
- Negative news gets more attention, which may be perceived as more valid and possibly more truthful.
- Offhand comments from colleagues or guests might seem much more important than they are in the context of the whole day.
We can clearly see the effect of this negativity bias, but what is the cause? Evolution of humans. Negative bias offers an evolutionary advantage. In evolution avoiding the risk of death is of the highest priority, although reproduction is crucial, there will be multiple occasions for this opportunity, and death cancels out the options. In other words, survival carries more weight than opportunity.
There is no surprise that the negative is more prevalent than the notion of positive/ opportunity.
Brands have implemented complaint management strategies to address negative feedback. Many companies set an annual target for customer satisfaction scores. Any low score impacts employees’ bonuses, brand image, and credibility, and companies pay a lot of attention to addressing negative feedback, going as far as compensation, discounts, freebies, etc. to those that complain.
Jesta Freak supports that companies should listen to their customers that have had an unpleasant experience and address the issues that caused the person to write a negative review. However, the context of the negative review is somewhat misplaced.
We believe in the opposite. You should listen to the people who rate you the highest, but there is a catch.
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