Do your customers trust you?

Forrester Report of Consumer Trust

A report out from the folks over at Forrester Research has some interesting numbers on consumer trust of various informational medium. Mike Phillips of Website Magazine seems to think the most interesting statistic from the report is that the survey sample had only 16% confidence in corporate blogs as an information source. More interesting to me is the 60% trust level of those surveyed in consumer reviews or product ratings as an accurate source of information.

I am generally skeptical of consumer reviews. If we can assume that the only customers with incentive to post reviews are those who are overly pleased or thoroughly disappointed in a product, then consumer reviews are in essence a polarized view of a product or service‘s quality. In general we can suppose (via basic statistics theory) that as the number of reviews increases the overall rating of the product will become closer to actual customer satisfaction.

This of course implies that consumer reviews are regulated so that only consumers are submitting them. We have seen that companies are using shady tactics to promote their own products (shame on you Belkin), even going as far as utilizing Mechanical Turk to do their dirty work.

What can be taken away from all this? If you‘re looking to promote your products in a underhanded way, money is all you need. If you‘re looking to buy that Belkin router with ‘blazing fast network speed‘ or ‘unbelievable range.‘ You might just want to read a review from someone a little more credible than BelkinFAN47.