No trust in trustpilot¶
Occasionally I write a passionate, but honest review on www.trustpilot.com. Mostly when I feel mistreated by a Company and I see no other way of getting back to them, vent my frustration and warn other people about their in my opinion malpractice. Part of this is clearly revenge, but I put most effort in it to keep it as close to the truth as I possibly can.
As I understood the intended use for trustpilot.com, that is what it is exactly for.
I did not spend much time writing reviews yet, but the ones I published were always honest and clearly showed a level of frustration beyond the normal level.
The second one I vividly remember was about www.postnord.no, a Norwegian postal service company.
My business with them went to the extend, that products I ordered online was supposed to be delivered through them. As far as I can recall, it always was delivered as well.
My problems are just that in comparison to Posten, Bring og HeltHjem, the suck at what they are doing. Almost every time PostNord seems to either take their sweet time with the delivery. Packages are either stuck at some of their terminals or they figure out today was not the day for delivery and they rather would like to try tomorrow. Something always comes in the way of making a straight-forward delivery. Always.
I am now at the point that I actively avoid delivery with PostNord. If they are the only way of delivery I go and buy somewhere else. Even if it is more expensive. And I drop the store a message and let them know why I did not buy there. I find this more compelling for a store to know that they have to pass on some business because of the delivery that they chose.
That was also what I wrote about in my review on TrustPilot a couple of weeks ago. Especially my effort in avoiding PostNord and letting the store know. The review was only for quite some time. Until TrustPilot dropped me a message the other day, telling me some routing has flagged my review and they had to verify its authenticity.
Interesting.
They requested I should come back to them in an email so that they could put the review online again.
With little effort I replied to their email politely and confirmed that I was indeed a human on the other end.
Then it took an interesting turn. A follow-up email then asked for further proof of “interaction” with PostNord by me, containing
Name of the Business
My Name
The date
A reference number
This was required due to their “Software has flagged [my] review for having unusual features”.
My last email respond to them contained a couple of things:
I pointed out that it was in their interested to verify the review, not in mine. I know where I stand on business with PostNord and providing reviews was their business model, not mine. I provided the review free-of-charge to them. If they keep it from being posted, that harms them, not me.
I will not provide further evidence nor will I put more effort in this particular review, since I am not making money on this.
I would be interested in how this review was not under review after being online for quite a while. Since I assume that their review system checks reviews on the time of posting, I suspect that PostNord has taken steps in order to start the verification process. I’d appreciate a clarification on this, but do not expect them to actually follow up on this.
This required further effort from my side lowers my trust into the brand TrustPilot to the level where I will not consider TrustPilot any more either. I do not expect many to actually follow up on this, which means more reviews being flagged and removed by their subject. This then will leave an artificially biased view on each brand. This makes it worthless in my eyes for anything by critic. Certainly TrustPilot is useless in the terms on providing an insight into good behaving brand names, if there is a bias towards positive reviews and against negative ones.
On that not further contact was made. I did not expect anything else.