Why A 4 Out Of 5 Star Review Is Actually Better

Before making virtually any major purchase nowadays, we rely on crowd sourced reviews. Reading online reviews before buying is an enormous aspect of purchase behavior. And that research takes shape mainly in two forms: Social Media and Reviews.

While similar in many regards the social media relies more on an existing personal relationship while online reviews can provide a more arbitrary look.

For any business, a review is an important aspect of success. The ability to gauge customer reactions and expectations provides insights to not only prospective customers, but also for companies to utilize at their discretion. While companies all strive for perfect scores, a carefully crafted review helps both future customers and the companies themselves, to better address areas of strengths and weaknesses.

This is where the power of the 4-Star review comes in. The majority of customers who research online, look at reviews at a glance. More often than not, a perfect rating is paired with a sentence or less. This in turn provides browsers little insight as to what the personal qualifications of a 5-star review entail.

Whether it’s all perfect scores, or all terrible scores, the overall score rarely tells a full story. A well written review (no matter what the rating) allows readers to take into account a wider breadth of the situation. The most thorough reviews are found in 4-star reviews.

4-star reviews are often accompanied with enriching details highlighting features they enjoyed. In addition, 4-star reviews tend to focus on details that would have improved their overall rating. These more detailed reviews are the best for potential customers to get a stronger sense of the product they are considering.

Ask yourself, if you were researching a product and found nothing but all perfect reviews with little to no comments, alarm bells would be going off, right? So while a higher score is certainly a fair metric to measure, keep an eye on longer written reviews for your business. These are the ones that the future customers will be reading.