I’m copying over the post below from the London category of the forum.
We are hoping for your feedback on our Repair Directory and the criteria we use to list businesses. While the Repair Directory currently only covers (parts of) London, we are hoping to open up to other cities in the future. Therefore we are hoping for feedback from as many people as possible!
So please let us know: How many reviews should a business have to be listed in the Repair Directory?
Thank you
Hello everyone,
As you know, we are running a Repair Directory for repair businesses in North and East London.
In there, we list businesses meeting our criteria for reliability:
They have a physical address
They provide a warranty of at least one month
They have at least 5 reviews of which 80% are positive.
But are these criteria strict enough?
We are considering to change the minimum number of reviews required to be listed - and for that we need your feedback:
How many reviews should a repair business have to be listed? When you are selecting a repair business to take your broken device to, what number of reviews are you looking for? Let us know by replying to this post!
Would you like to get more involved?
We are looking for volunteers to help us test the procedure for updating business entries:
You will be updating the reviews and contact details for each business. Afterwards, you’ll share your feedback on the procedure. This can be done completely from home - all you need is a computer/laptop with an internet connection. Your time commitment can be as big or small as you like.
Interested? Send me a message and I will give you all the details you need.
Ideally you would like to do some of the operations above automatically, i run a reviews app for thousands of websites and I might be able to help. Feel free to contact me directly if you would like to discuss further.
I suppose that I can claim some expertise in this area since the company that I work for in my day job maintains a review system…
Unfortunately “it’s complicated” and I wouldn’t like to suggest that the experience with that system (which involves continuous active vetting and active customer service) is transferable to the Repair Directory…
One thing that occurs to me is that 5 reviews isn’t many and that if you have 5 reviews of which 4 are slightly positive and one is completely awful then you will be accepted on the Repair Directory.
Now, you can probably get 4 friends and relations to give you positive reviews quite easily, so it’s not difficult to game the current system.
Maybe double it up to 10 ratings?
Also, very old ratings should be ignored for lots of reasons, so you probably want something like:
at least 10 reviews within the last year
at least 80% positive
10 reviews in a year is less than one per month, so it shouldn’t be too hard to manage…
Maybe we should publish guidelines for businesses, so they are encouraged to solicit reviews from their customers? My experience is that people are much more likely to leave negative than positive reviews which will bias any review system against the business, unfortunately, so to make it fair, you have to ask customers to submit positive as well as negative reviews.
Thank you for the feedback!
You mentioned some really good points there, especially about older reviews being less valuable. I also like the idea of publishing guidelines for businesses.
We’ll look into what is possible with our resources and we will share any updates here in the forum.
Thank you again for your feedback!
We have now introduced some changes to the listing criteria: From now on, newly listed businesses need to have at least 10 reviews in order to be published in the directory. This increases the reliability of the listing without requiring software changes. An exception is made for businesses who have less than 10 reviews, but have volunteered at Restart community events.
Businesses that are already listed will be informed about the changing criteria. They are given time until March to increase their number of reviews.
We are planning further changes to the criteria, with the goal of making updates of business entries as easy and automatic as possible. This however will require changes to the software, which are planned to take place later in 2020.
We will keep you updated about future updates and changes!
So please let us know: How many reviews should a business have to be listed in the Repair Directory?
How many reviews should a repair business have to be listed?
