My wife and I recently booked a trip for our wedding anniversary (more about that in a future post). We were checking out several online reviews of the hotels at our desired location. There were a number of negative reviews which involved almost every single hotel we considered! Most of these negative reviews were very recent (within the last month), and almost all of the reviews were focused on the timeliness and/or quality of service. Some of the reviews seemed almost inappropriate or way over the top. When you factor in that almost every industry right now, but especially the restaurant and hotel industry, is short-staffed due to lay-offs and cut-backs during the early COVID-19 pandemic, it seems that some of these reviews were a little unfair. My wife and I ended up ignoring most of them, and we looked at the older reviews instead.
As it turns out, our anecdotal experience here has a solid foundation in research. Psychologists call it the "just world" theory, which is a cognitive bias that the world is fair and that people will get what they deserve in life. Applied to the current situation, we felt that the hotels were being treated unfairly - the guests who provided overly negative reviews weren't taking into consideration that these hotels were likely understaffed to deal with the increased demand for rooms and service.
Business leaders - including those of us in health care - have to manage negative reviews all the time. Studies show that more than half of all consumers refer to online reviews ("word-of-mouth" communication) before making a purchase, and three-fourths of consumers say that they trust an online review just as much as a personal recommendation from someone who they know. And while positive reviews are great, negative reviews tend to be more impactful.
But, what happens when these reviews are unfairly negative? A group of studies ("Negative reviews, positive impact: Consumer empathetic responding to unfair word of mouth") published recently in the Journal of Marketing provides some answers. In one of these studies, the investigators randomized 223 graduate students to read one of three online reviews from the same fictional company. The reviews involved the timeliness of getting an answer from the company on a service query. In the positive review, the customer was answered within 24 hours, while in the negative/fair review, the customer had to wait two weeks for a response. However, in the negative/unfair review, the customer complained about not getting a response, even though it was Christmas Eve.
What the investigators found might surprise you, but it does seem consistent with the anecdote I shared at the beginning of this post. Study subjects who read the negative/unfair review were just as likely to say that they would purchase the product from the company as the subjects who read the positive review! In subsequent experiments, the investigators made the negative reviews even more unfair - in these cases, the subjects were more likely to purchase the product than even those subjects in the positive review.
In other words, consistent with the "just world" theory, fairness matters. Even if an organization receives a negative online review, it may not be the end of the world. If the review is unfair, it may actually result in a positive gain for the organization.
I don't necessarily want to make this post about online reviews of physicians or hospitals. However, one of the biggest concerns I hear about publishing patient/family experience scores or reviews online is that they may be unfairly negative. It would be interesting to know if this "just world" theory applies to online physician and hospital reviews as well.
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