Dear Startups, Your 5-Stars Rating is Broken. Fix It.
We’ve heard thousands of sad stories about online drivers who lose their job just because some random customer gave them a 1-star rating. It’s tragic and unfair since most of the drivers look like cannot plea and defend themselves against this malpractice of the consumers.
To be fair, I don’t know how companies actually implement their system. It’s such a mystery; even the drivers themselves do not understand how it works. Based on rumours among the drivers, receiving 1-star or 2-stars rating will instantly suspend their account. Getting 3-stars rating is going to “shadowban” them for weeks which they will receive fewer orders during that time.
It’s such an unfair situation for them since their job’s performance relies purely on a one-tap judgement from the customer. The review itself is such a raw data to be consumed as a key performance index for the driver.
What if the customer is in a terrible mood, and they tend to give anyone that day a bad rating? What if the customer is just a pure troll? What if the customer doesn’t know whether 1-star is the worst rating while 5-stars is the best one?
What if the customer have such a different opinion about the rating scale with how the company actually think it is?
It does happen. Just look at Pacific Ocean’s rating on Google Map. It’s 3.5, and people gave them 1-star ratings here and there. By the startup standards, Pacific Ocean should be out of service right away.
Obviously, rating an ocean is not a serious matter. Most of the rating is just there for the memes. But look at the various Google Play rating or products on the various marketplace. People do leave 1-star rating randomly. And as a service or product seller (or in this case, online drivers), it sucks when someone just randomly gave them 1-star rating out of nowhere.
After hearing a lot of those sad stories, we as the customer do not have many review options. 5-stars could mean anything, from actual excellence service to “just-okay”, 4-stars could mean “there-are-some-annoyances-but-it’s-alright”, and below that point, you’d rather not give them any review than risking their driver’s job.
The rating becomes very inflated; the rating is basically useless since almost everyone is 4-stars rated. Why bother looking at it? It’s also become harder for the customer to genuinely rate their services while not destroying their driver’s job at the same time. Our only option in the app is just giving them an okay rating (in this case, 4 or 5) with actual comments and criticism on it.
But comments don’t show on the driver’s key performance index and cannot be quantified or shown easily. They need a better rating system, so both customers can actually giving them proper reviews and the drivers should not lose the job right away.
Maybe, just maybe, remove the low-star-suspend policy while gradually reviewing the rating system? Tens bad ratings obviously a dead giveaway, but a single lousy rating should never exterminate someone’s source of income.
You guys have the best talents in the country right now. Fix your rating system.
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Ditulis oleh Teguh Andi Raharjo, founder JurusanHI.com, situs kumpulan artikel Hubungan Internasional.