The days of complaints being kept secret and away from the eyes of the public seems gone forever. Do a good job and get positive rewards of more people visiting and more money. Do a bad job and get negative rewards as people actively avoid the venue.
It is very surprising how much weight venues place on reports from tripadvisor.com. They have come to learn that what people say about them has a major effect on the amount of money in the till at the end of the day. Striving to get a high ranking is both a challenge and sense of pride. It is not unlike the feeling of taking a report card home to your parents filled with top marks.
Using Bangkok restaurants as an example, there are over 7700 restaurants listed, and only the ones that put true effort in customer satisfaction are in the top 1%. But looking at the ranking is just one thing, learning how to read between the lines to get their true ranking is a bit of an art.
The key to finding out how a restaurant is truly ranked is by seeing how many reports it has, and the spacing of reports. You also need to look at how most people have rated the restaurant. Occasionally you will come across a report that just looks out of place amongst the others. It may be a bad report by a malicious person who has nothing better to do than make trouble for others. On Internet forums these people are sometimes called trolls.
To spot those trolls, you need to look at other reports they have filed to see if there is a pattern. If they are consistently bad mouthing venues, then you can feel comfortable in writing off their report. You can also spot if they are more or less working for another venue as there will be one glowing report amongst all the negative reports. That is particularly true if the negative reports are on similar venues.
As rankings are done by software, negative reports require human intellect to properly rank. So a venue that may be software ranked at 105, may actually be better than one ranked at 90 if it has negative reports by one or more trolls.
So in short, people can feel empowered with this form of social media. It causes venues to strive to be their best. When this form of competitiveness takes hold, it is clearly a win, win situation for everyone. Venues can take pride and reap rewards, while poor venues who don’t care about customer satisfaction will more quickly go out of business.
This does not only apply to restaurants, it also applies to hotels and every other group that is ranked on the site. This is clearly one of the more positive sites on the Internet, and that is why we have given it a Shining Star.
