The value of online reviews

By Andrew Glover, managing director at UK Doors Online

We got another Trustpilot review! With all the reviews on UK Doors being 5 out of 5, I thought to myself, ‘surely we are the best.’ So, I checked.

I was really surprised to see that pretty much all bi-fold door suppliers have really good and high review figures on both Trustpilot and Google. This is really encouraging to see. It shows that, as an industry, we are performing pretty well, but also that the companies are all paying attention to this and ensuring they stay high.

The value of reviews is priceless, in my opinion. I use reviews for pretty much everything I buy online and if a company has multiple negative reviews, which aren’t responded too, I will move on to a different supplier.

I don’t always pay attention to the negative reviews, as we all know that sometimes they only show half the story and the reality is actually much different, so will generally disregard them.

However, we did get our first negative review last week, and got a 1 star! I was really disappointed with this, so after some digging, found out who the customer was.

It turned out that the person that did the review was a third party, sub-contract installation company (I think that’s what they said), who couldn’t finish their part of the installation contract off, as they were waiting for parts from us.

After more digging, I found that we had posted the replacement parts out, to the address the customer gave us, three times, but they had apparently never turned up. We then checked the tracking and found the person that signed for them.

I contacted the chap that left the negative review, informed him of who had received these parts (three times) and asked him to see if they were there. Five minutes later and the review was changed to a 5 star, with a comment about how good our service was.

Had we not been paying attention, that 1 star review would have stayed there forever and we would be wondering why sales had slowed down!

In conclusion, we are still the highest rated company I could find with 4.8 out of 5 (some others had the same), and I felt a little bit of pride to be involved in an industry that is performing well.