Whenever I’m planning a girls night out or a birthday surprise, I typically find myself on websites such as Yelp or Google to read reviews of the place I am planning on spending my money. We all do it. We all feel the need to express our opinion and there’s enough platforms online that give us that power. Of course, when you log on to read a review you expect it to be credible. You would assume that someone actually had an experience bad enough they felt the need to post about it online or truly so amazing that they wanted the business to get the recognition they deserve. Right? Wrong.

I work front desk in a service industry. I could be biased but I have to say, it’s well ran business. Every T is crossed and all the I's are dotted. Management recently started to use tools such as Yelp and Groupon to expand our local business. The sales reps on the phone sell you the prettiest picture with the numbers to back it and they're not wrong. I can say the clientele has grown with the investment of online advertisement. It also has brought awareness to our societies new entitlement.

It's almost an online gag. Pictures can go viral on Twitter or Facebook for poor customer service experiences. In order to keep a good reputation, many large corporations offer compensation and apologies for mistakes. It could be a few free coupons or 50% off your next service, depending on what you are complaining about and how large the business is. This isn't the worst system ever and I have been one of those people who have reached out to corporate over poor experiences then received some sort of compensation for my feedback.

Here’s the problem:

As I mentioned, the business I work for now has more online advertising, coupons or promo codes on big traffic websites. I spent a few hours browsing through our reviews, looking for genuine feedback and I started to notice a trend. I would have customers leave, raving about their experience and then leave a poor review online. This never made sense to me, what did we do wrong? I would call or speak to the customer in person, and I seemed to be getting the same answer. “Well, what are you going to do about it?" or "What do you want to give me to take the review down?"

Being a small, family owned business, we would go bankrupt if we handed out free services. Especially for the sake of an online reputation. While a few of our complaints were legit and we addressed them as necessary, I found some of our negative reviews didn't actually reflect their opinion. I found people who would post negative lies on every website they could, trying to get something free out of us so they could come back. I even found Facebook pages dedicated to people who work the system in order to get discounts or free services. These Facebook pages have thousands of followers posting what companies to go to, what to say, and what you get in return for your complaint.

Another thing I have found our competitors do is post reviews on our pages encouraging people to not go there and then recommend their own business instead of ours. It’s a giant online game, a better term would be a scam.

How do you stop this? I don’t think you can. You can’t tell large corporations to get off Twitter and stop listening to customer complaints. Feedback is one of the most important things a business can ask for. Businesses only survive on a large customer base and tailoring the product or service to their need can be key. As I mentioned before, I personally have written to large companies about real issues I have had with my experience or product and I like to know that they are listening to me. This can turn into a grey area though if you’re customers aren’t giving you real feedback and they are searching for a freebie.

I don’t know how much I trust online review websites now based on my experience on the other side. I would rather use my friends or people who I trust for their opinion as a source of business review compared to the internet. You never know the intentions of the person behind the review anymore.