Why businesses should strive for a bad review on Trustpilot

When he was 20, studying for a business degree at the University of Aarhus, Peter Muhlmann had to sit an exam. He found himself sitting at a desk with about a hundred other students in the room. “You could smell the anxiety,” he says. “It was so quiet you could hear the scratching of pens on paper.” About an hour into the exam he got up and walked out.

Then he dropped out of university. “I realised that none of it really mattered. It didn’t make enough of a difference.” So he remained ungraded. The ironic thing is that he then went on to create Trustpilot, the consumer review website, in which everybody can give a grade to anything and everything.

When we meet in a cafe (4.5 stars) around the corner from Victoria station, he kindly offers to speak either in Danish or English. I would rate his English as five stars, whereas my dansk is around one star at best, so that was a no-brainer. Muhlmann was born 36 years ago in a small Danish town near the German border. His mother was a nurse and his father was a doctor, and before he dropped out he had been a straight-A student who always did his homework. “But at a certain point I got frustrated with writing essays. You spend a lot of time writing it and then someone sticks a mark on it in five minutes.” He didn’t trust the grading system.

He had friends who were entrepreneurs – “I thought the reward mechanism was so much clearer” – and his degree was too theoretical, so he set up an e-commerce business of his own in 2004. “You learn something because you need it, not because someone tells you to. How to do a budget, for example: your motivation to learn is different. It really matters.”

At that time e-commerce was starting to become more mainstream and even his parents were using it. “I noticed how they often had bad experiences online. Back then if you did a search of a product you might get one person on a forum called ‘Anonymous Horse’ giving an opinion and then a random article. It was hard to stick it all together.”

Muhlmann stresses there was no eureka moment, as such. “It’s not like you’re sitting in a bath with your rubber duck and then you suddenly have this lightbulb going off in your head.” But all the same he was starting to ask himself if it would be possible to gather together the experiences of customers in one place.

First of all he dreamed up a toolbar with a red button and a green button. “Even my Dad uninstalled the tool bar,” he says. “‘I’m sorry, son’, he said. ‘It just doesn’t work’. Good feedback.” After that he came up with another 10 ideas. “Only two of them ever worked. Fortunately I’m good at recognising other people’s good ideas.”

You have to remember that all this was back in the days before you felt obliged to take a photograph of your meal and post your verdict on the pizza. “People really want to share their opinions,” he says. “It seems obvious now, but then it was a really novel thing.”

He set up Trustpilot in Copenhagen in 2007 (the name had to be in English, not Danish). The idea didn’t fly right from the start. He recalls sleeping on a couch in Southwark, sharing a two-bedroom house with about five other people, and going around trying to sell the idea. People were sceptical about awarding stars. “So you’re from a tiny, tiny company in Denmark that no one’s ever heard of,” they would say.

Muhlmann would talk with companies and tell them that what customers are saying really matters. “Some of them thought that was the craziest thing. They had a fortress mentality. Every now and then they would catapult information over the wall to the villagers down below.” He found that it was the companies that cared most about customer service who were most interested: their problem was that they weren’t rewarded for it, they couldn’t show it – but Trustpilot could.

Muhlmann has a strong sense of what he calls “platform responsibility”. “There used to be a mindset: we’re just a platform, we’re not responsible for what people say.” But he reckons that reviews are only useful if you trust the reviewer, which means you trust the platform. So a lot of their work goes into weeding out or blocking fake reviews. Just as banks can identify credit card fraud on the basis of a pattern of behaviour, Trustpilot has built an algorithm around what a normal, trustworthy review looks like, designed to eliminate malicious “reviews”, often from people who have never seen or bought the product.

And the way you engineer the platform makes a big difference to the messages that people leave. For example, it produces a much better response if you ask people for their “honest” opinion rather than an “objective” one. “We try to make it easy for people to share their opinion. We ask politely because we don’t want people to only make negative comments.

The average review is four-and-a-half stars. Muhlmann thinks that reviewers are reasonable in their expectations. “People don’t expect perfect. If you’re buying a cheap camera, you don’t expect a lens that will take a picture of a galaxy a billion light years away, or a battery that lasts forever.”

The worst thing you can say, in the world of user-generated content, is not one star, but “no comment” or nothing. Trustpilot recently ran a test in which users were presented with two different review pages: one was blank and the other contained one bad review. People were more encouraged to buy by the bad review than by no review at all. “It’s considered rude now,” says Mulhmann, “if you don’t write about your experience.”

Trustpilot is guided by two fundamental principles. One is freedom of speech, but the other is to “make the world a better place”. And in particular to get companies to up their game. They now have 77 million reviews of 345,000 companies.

The new feature that Trustpilot launched in January allows users to see at a glance how companies respond to bad reviews, what they do by way of response or rectification, over a sustained period. “A good response to a bad review is worth more than 10 good reviews,” reckons Muhlmann. “Consumers want to know how the business is reacting.”

Muhlmann says he knows of one company where they baked a cake with five stars on it after a good review. And every now and then users will come up to him and tell him how Trustpilot has made a difference to them. One such user was his uncle, whose internet provider wasn’t working too well. “I called them to complain but they didn’t care about me,” said his uncle. “I posted a review on Trustpilot and within 15 minutes they called me and apologised and fixed the problem.”

I’m not going to give Trustpilot a star rating. I don’t have to because other people have already done it, on Trustpilot. The review website is brave enough to print reviews of itself. One guy gives them one star because they took down his review. Another one gives them five stars and writes: “I love the site because I believe I can trust the reviews. A+”