Putting customer reviews to the test

Not only can your own reputation suffer considerable damage if reviews are manipulated, but there is also the threat of far-reaching legal consequences. In this blog article, you will gain an insight into the technical side of quality assurance at ProvenExpert and find out what we do to prevent the manipulation of customer reviews.

Access to the survey - who can rate and recommend?

ProvenExpert users decide for themselves who can submit a review. In the privacy settings, you can specify that online surveys can only be accessed by invitation via email and access code. This ensures that the reviewer has actually used the profile owner's service and that a competitor cannot simply submit a review with malicious intent. Anyone who has enabled their profile for visitor feedback can deactivate surveys that are no longer current. This means that no further ratings can be submitted for this survey.

The good ones go into the pot - the bad ones go into your crop

Before a customer review can appear on the profile, its authenticity is checked. This not only prevents fake reviews from competitors or trolls from ending up on the profile, but also self-assessments by the profile owner.

The classic method of verifying a review is by e-mail. A confirmation e-mail is sent to the e-mail address provided by the reviewer, which must be replied to. It is also possible to confirm the review with the account in a social network (LinkedIn, Xing, Facebook, Google). Without this verification, the review will not be released. This prevents duplicate or “joke reviews”.

There are also two variants of indirect verification that make it easier for the reviewer to provide feedback:

• Users who have been invited to submit a review by email are considered verified as they have already actively clicked on a link in an email.
• Users who already have a ProvenExpert account and are logged in to another user's survey are also considered verified.

All reviews must be approved by the user in order to be displayed on the publicly accessible profile. If not all reviews are approved, the public profile and the expert seal will no longer show the overall result, but only the number of approved reviews.

Regardless of whether ratings are approved by the user or not, ratings that contradict our rating guidelines or quality assurance criteria do not appear on the profile and are not included in the rating. However, they are stored in our database and thus documented.

Reviews: report yes, delete no

Despite all care and precautions, there is of course never 100% certainty that a manipulated review will not be approved. In addition to the automatic checks, reviews can therefore be reported by users and visitors to the profile. We then receive the reports and check them personally. If the review violates our usage guidelines, it will be deactivated. This means that the rating in question will no longer appear on the profile and will no longer be included in the rating.

However, it is not possible to delete a review. This could result in legal action being taken against our users for unfair competition. However, users can use the reporting function mentioned above to report violations of our user guidelines. In this case, the reviews will be deactivated and archived with a note. They are therefore still available for later review, but are no longer publicly visible on the profile.