Reviews and Ratings are highly important to on and offline retailers, and can have a huge impact on the customer’s purchasing decisions. But unfortunately, reviews and rating are often filled with spam or false posts, aimed at misleading customers into believing things are far away from reality.
To tackle this serious issue, in 2015, the UK Competition and Markets Authority carried out a consultation which had the following outcome:
The Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) has found that online reviews and endorsements are proving useful to consumers, but it has concerns that some practices may be unlawful. In the course of its work, the CMA heard about instances of potentially misleading practices:
- fake reviews being posted onto review sites
- negative reviews not being published
- businesses paying for endorsements in blogs and other online articles without this being made clear to consumers
Source: UK government
Why Neighbourhood Reviews and Ratings are more trustworthy
At Neighborhood, we will will take a robust approach to generating and verifying the genuine user reviews and ratings, which reflect true consumer feedback. As as our key offer is around trust, it is in both our interests and that of our users, to make sure all reviews and ratings are fair and genuine. To this end we will:
- Remove untrustworthy reviews using the latest machine learning techniques: Implement machine learning techniques using a semi-supervised learning approach to identify and remove spam and malicious reviews. This will combine the power of technology and human moderation in an iterative and intelligent way that is also highly cost-effective.
- Use natural language processing to calculate additional ratings scores: Employ a text mining approach with natural language processing to identify and understand the sentiment and semantics of genuine reviews. These will then be summarized and evaluated to generate an additional, automated rating score for each product and service of business entities.
- Provide a mechanism for verified transaction reviews: This will ensure that only Neighborhood users who have brought a particular product or used a particular service are eligible to post a review on the product and the user experience they encountered. This is done with the help of vouchers which are generated after each and every genuine transaction that acts as a form of an agreement to prove their purchase. These vouchers only become valid for Neighbourhood users to redeem if they review the product and their service. As this is the same for all of client business partners, there is no way for them to game the system.