Towards the end of 2011 Facebook launched a new feature for business pages – that of a star-based review system. As my company – Fresh Mango Technologies – has a very good customer satisfaction rating and near 100% customer retention, I thought this was a great opportunity to to publicize our customer satisfaction and having read Likeable Social Media: How to Delight Your Customers, Create an Irresistible Brand, and Be Generally Amazing on Facebook by Dave Kerpen, I was all fired up about marketing via social media channels.
Initially all was well and as expected we got numerous five star reviews but then all of a sudden our rating plummeted from 5 stars to three. After looking through the reviews, I found two that had given us one star ratings – from their public Facebook profiles both appeared to be school kids and neither had ever been customers of Fresh Mango.
I have contacted both politely asking how we could improve our service but have recieved no response.
I looked for the ‘Dispute Review’ or ‘Delete Review’ button and herein lies the problem: there is none.
At the time of writing, there is literally no mechanism for companies to request the removal of an unfair review on Facebook – this completely undermines the review system and opens up to very simple commercial sabotage. All a dishonest competitor needs to do is to pay a bunch of school kids to visit your company page and leave a one star review and your companies rating will bomb on Facebook.
A quick search online shows a page with numerous other users facing the same issue and still no resolution from Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/help/community/question/?id=10152004208270831
