I have been a Yelp fan for years, but as other online customer review platforms have gotten better at assisting business owners, Yelp has gotten worse – in fact, down right awful.
The concept is a good one; allow customers to review a business that they have visited by giving it both a description of their experience and a rating of one to five stars. Yelp has also gone out of its way to limit the number of fake reviews with its highly secretive review algorithm. The algorithm detects if users set up duplicate accounts, it recognizes when fake reviews are posted and often filters reviews from a business’ competitors. The folks at Yelp have spent a long time developing this algorithm and have performed a lot of testing to distinguish between a real review and a fake one.
As other review platforms such as Google Places, Kudzu and Angie’s List continue to upgrade their system, Yelp has made very little improvements. Indeed, their interface and search results are as full of holes today as they were years ago.
For example, their review filtering system lacks so much flexibility that businesses often have as many filtered reviews (customer reviews that are filtered from view because Yelp does not believe them to be legitimate) as visible reviews. It’s important to maintain the integrity of a review platform, but it’ frustrating to ask customers to review your business only to have those legitimate reviews hidden from view time after time.
When it comes to a lack of flexibility, Yelp’s advertising is as rigid as its review algorithm. Yelp sales Reps like to assert how Google is a place where consumers go to perform research and Yelp is where they go to purchase. This, they believe, gives them an edge over Google in promoting their banner ads. Yelp ads don’t compare to the flexibility of Google, however. In fact, they’re not even in the same ball park. Google offers in depth analytical data and gives an advertiser more options to manipulate an ad then they can ever use. Yelp does none of this. A Yelp ad is placed on a page completely at Yelp’s discretion, not the advertiser’s.
Probably the worst part of Yelp is its customer support, which is almost non-existent. If a business has an issue with their listing, there is no phone number or email which to report the issue. There is only a submission form with a drop down list of categories. If a consumer’s problem does not fit within one of those categories then the form does not get submitted. Yelp is clearly not interested in helping business owners who do not advertise with them.
What Yelp forgets is that businesses are relying more and more on customer reviews. But these are not just businesses. They are business owners – mostly small business owners. People. Yelp’s negligence and lack of respect for business owners reveals an ugly discontent for any improvement that does not lead to more advertising dollars.
Online customer review platforms allow consumers to hold businesses more accountable. With such accountability, however, comes responsibility on the part of the platform to provide accurate information and to not stand in the way of good businesses. Unfortunately for Yelp, this is an area for which they receive only one star.
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