How best to implement customer ratings on your website
Adding to my context based post for Linkedin, I wanted to touch a general topic on ‘Why a single dimensional rating (a.k.a the standard five-star rating) added to a product or service page is not really beneficial to a customer’.There are two main reasons for this -
Reason # 1
Usually a successful retailer or a professional services company focuses on a specific range of products or services (unless they are Amazon or Walmart). Putting a single dimensional rating system for these products do not convey the specific information which the customer is looking for.
Example 1
Let me give you an example : A central vacuum store (Store A) will sell a variety of central vacuums and the customer would like to compare one central vacuum model against other central vacuum models and some of the attributes used for such a comparison are :
1. Price 2. Power 3. hose length 4. maintenance 5. part availability 6. installation rates 7. Accesseries 8. Bag vs Bagless
As you see, a single dimensional rating fails here because the context is not provided on what factors were used to rate the service provider in the first place.
Reason # 2
If I want to choose between two service providers or retailers, I would need a scoring system which is consistent across the two service providers.
Example 2
If I use the previous example, I should be rating Store A with Store B who also sells central vacuums. This means they should be using the same form which rates these two retailers ideally using the same attributes ie. 1. Price 2. Power 3. hose length 4. maintenance 5. part availability 6. installation rates 7. Accesseries 8. Bag vs Bagless
This is where a standard form comes in handy which can also do scoring across multiple ratings.
Summary
So to summarize, the best way to implement customer ratings on your website is to use mulitple ratings especially if you sell products or services. This should go along with the reviews you capture on your website.
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