I am pretty sure that most people in the world have not given a lot of thought to the exploding dynamic of online rating systems. Angieslist.com is becoming a rating site standard for just about any service or professional that you might want to hire in your city. There are also independent sites that rate doctors http://www.ratemds.com/ lawyers http://www.lawyerratingz.com/ teachers http://www.ratemyteachers.com/, hotels http://www.tripadvisor.com/, restaurants http://www.yelp.com, and just about everything else. These sites are quietly supporting a whole new way for people to make decisions on spending money. It is time for us to examine what this trend will blossom into in the near future.
People throw around the word transparency a lot. As in, the more transparent someone is, the more we know about him or her. In a business sense, we have for all of mankind picked professionals and service providers from the Yellow Pages, or a recommendation. The problem with this is that there was very little way to get any transparency into what the service might be like after we bought it. If you really step back, that is a pretty crude way to operate. My guess is we have not had much of an option because it would have been too much trouble to call five references on a plumber, car repair shop, heat and air operation, or a doctor. Plus, we know they would only give us references that would be good so it would be a waste of time. In other words, we hire people with zero transparency into how well they perform. This is great for the service providers – especially the ones that suck. They have the ability to perform poor service, and simply get five new, and naïve, customers the next day.
Ratings site completely change the game. In fact, they create a game with a new set of rules that both sides will have to sort out. Now that we all will have the ability to rate every service provider in a few seconds from our mobile device, which will give us transparency because we can check their customer history before we do business with them. From the customer side, problem solved – we should never have to deal with buyer beware again. Well, that is if the ratings are righteous, and if the service provider has not stuffed the ratings box with friends and relatives reviews.
From the service provider’s viewpoint, they will now live in fear of the negative ratings that could decimate their career – and this will happen. And when it happens, many of them will be surprised that a little thing like Angies list will have that power. Welcome to the social tech age my friends. So the only dilemma here is that people tend to be more vocal about negative ratings than positive so the odds are service providers will collect more haters than evangelist. Uh Oh…
The bottom line is the game is going to change dramatically over the next five year. If you are a service provider, you better get an online management strategy in place. If you don’t, you better hope you never make a mistake with a tech savvy customer…
Scott Klososky
Scott@klososky.com