The National Consumer Federation (NCF) was delighted to be present on 6 September 2018 when the British Standards Institution (BSI) launched the international standard BS ISO 20488:2018 Online Consumer Reviews – principles and requirements for their collection, moderation and publication.
Timely and Global
This standard is timely and being international, recognises that online purchases are often cross border, thus needing a global approach to standardisation. It is vital that there is a rapid take up of the standard and every encouragement should be given to scheme providers to meet the requirements and accept the guidance given by the standard.
NCF Showed the Way
In 2013 the NCF commissioned a report Trust schemes for consumers: What ’good’ looks like which established a benchmark for what ‘good’ looks like for consumers and demonstrated that none of the trust schemes we looked at met all of our six key recommendations. We then initiated a meeting held at BEIS, London to bring all the businesses and other stakeholders involved in customer feedback schemes together with BSI. Our recommendation from that meeting was that there should be a standard to ensure that consumers could trust the feedback provided by customer feedback schemes.
feefo Review
feefo has undertaken reviews of the consumers’ perspective of online reviews. Their research indicates just how quickly the use of online customer feedback has developed since our report. In their latest report 94% of consumers said that they check reviews when looking for a product or service. This is a substantial increase on the 75% found in their research last year. Conversely their research indicated that 89% of those surveyed said they were worried about fake reviews, which again is a big increase compared with the 75% who gave the same response last year.
Not just seen but believed
These worrries underline the need for early and wide adoption of this standard. A couple of blogs ago we were talking about banks having to display in-branch their customer satisfaction ratings and how the way they collected their data underpinned the credibility of the ratings. This sort of information for consumers should not only be seen – it must be believed.