“You don’t ever want to rent from these people. They never answer the phone or are in the office and just doubled my rent. Oh, and I have rats in my unit!”

When customer reviews first showed up online ten years ago, I just hated them. I bet you did, too. Initially, I saw some really horrific reviews posted about my company. It used to infuriate me that one customer had the ability to rake a business over the coals in front of everyone — and you had no power over it. I also noticed that often, bad reviews came from tenants who were late on their rent. Whenever a bad review was posted, I would get a sinking feeling in my stomach that we would never have a new customer again and were completely finished as a company.

Fast forward to today, and my feelings have changed. I can now say that I like online reviews, though I still don’t love them. When I view the concept of online reviews objectively, an amazing number of good things have come out of that immediate online feedback system. There are benefits to the online reviewing system, both for our customers and our company.

How online reviews help customers

For our customers, online reviews have:

• Produced much better and consistent service/treatment

• Improved our product offering and lowered pricing

• Created a new feedback loop that prompted our team to address a poor experience and work with the customer to improve it

• Made it easy for customers to compare us to others

How online reviews help companies

Once my company embraced the opportunity for increased competition, we got a lot out of online reviews as well, as we focused on improving our products and services — and therefore our score — to compare favorably. We got:

• Higher sales and revenue

• A new form of public recognition for our teammates, which boosted their morale and confidence as well as redoubled their efforts to produce more 5-star reviews from customers

How online reviews have changed

Over a decade ago, when online reviews first launched, the customer had too much power. For example, when a customer posted a bad Yelp review of your business, you could contact them to try and improve things. But unfortunately, I found that sometimes these consumers would demand money to remove the review since they were not really seeking better service — they were seeking payment. At the time, Yelp also received criticism from small-business owners who claimed that the service threatened to feature negative reviews or even remove positive reviews unless they paid for advertising. These practices seem to have stopped in the years since a class-action lawsuit against Yelp was dismissed, but in the meantime, other review sites like Google have become more relevant.

Google, for its part, will listen to the business’s side of the story and remove reviews where appropriate. I also believe that consumers have evolved from those early days of Wild West reviews and extortion and now write better, more accurate reviews, too.

Final thoughts

So, I have come full circle from “Oh my word, what will giving all this power to the consumer do to my business?” to kind of liking consumer reviews. They have improved the overall consistency and quality of our product and service, improved front-line team morale and allowed customers to compare us to our competitors.

And because we now compare pretty well at a 4.9 average rating, we have improved our topline in a way that we couldn’t have before. So, I am even willing to say: Thank you, Google!