It is well known that anonymous and pseudo-anonymous feedback forums online, like Yelp and Craigslist, have a negativity problem. In emotionally disconnected and consequence-free environments, users tend towards over-the-top and unhelpful negative feedback, and just plain meanness.
I am starting to believe that apps whose services involve human interaction in the real world, ranging from Uber and Flywheel to Instacart and Postmates, suffer from the opposite problem. Feedback forms on these apps are designed in a way that people have incentives to be too nice, not too mean. This niceness destroys the value of the feedback and makes it hard for these marketplaces to measure the quality of their service.
Let me explain the problem, and then offer a product solution.
The other day I had a poor experience in an Uber. When I next opened the app and was asked for feedback on my last ride, I gave the driver five stars and left no comments. I acted the same way I always do, despite my negative experience.
I did this because, in the moment, giving the driver positive feedback was extremely easy and guilt free, whereas giving honest feedback would have been cognitively and emotionally expensive.
The cost of giving negative feedback on a system like Uber is first and foremost that it just requires more thought and clicks. If I am in a rush to book my next car, the last thing I want to be contemplating is whether three or four stars is more appropriate for the experience I had, and the idea of typing a comment is just simply abhorrent.
The deeper issue, however, is that it is as hard to be negative about a person you have interacted with in the real world as it is easy to be mean to someone you have never met. I have a difficult time doing harm to a person who served me by giving him a negative review, in favor of an abstract need to police the network, especially when I doubt I will ever ride with him again anyway.
In this respect, the Uber feedback form is a classic free rider problem. The best scenario for me personally would be if everyone else gave accurate and honest feedback, thereby keeping good drivers on the road and kicking bad drivers off, but I could continue to feel good about the easy decision to always give my drivers five stars.
I have the same logic for almost every single on-demand service I use. It is illogical as an individual to give negative feedback on Shyp, Instacart, Postmates, DoorDash, Sprig, and the whole lot.
If the problem with feedback in the anonymous digital world was that a lack of connection made humans naturally more negative, the problem with feedback as technology crosses over into the real world is that we tend to be overly nice to the people who we see face to face.
Let me propose a solution.
I think on-demand services should switch to a model where instead of giving star ratings on experiences, you are offered a “thank you” button and comment which, if clicked, pushes to the service provider a personal message thanking them for the help they gave you.
Two Benefits
There are two main benefits here. First, changing the feedback mechanism to a simple “thank you” or “skip” I think will dramatically increase the amount of signal that marketplaces will get about who is doing a good job and who isn’t. People are not used to thinking about how many stars to give someone, but they are are used to thinking about whether or not to thank a person for a job they have done. There is a social context for it and it is completely natural. If that mechanism had been in place the other day, I would not have thanked my under-par Uber driver but would have just skipped giving feedback.
Second, I honestly believe it would help with provider engagement. Most of the on-demand services are facing very high provider churn rates. I think that a constant trickle of thank you notifications coming from passengers would be quite a positive and valuable re-engagement mechanism for getting people to want to drive more and continue to work for a service. People crave likes; they’re almost as powerful as money.
There is a parallel here, obviously, in the online world. Facebook has been a champion of this direction of thinking about feedback for a long time. The focus on real identity and local communities at the outset made Facebook a far more positive place online than the flame-fests of consequence-free forums. The Like button (and explicit lack of a dislike button) has created a space where people show appreciation for others and content in a way that drives participation and gives the platform ample signal on the quality of content.
It is possible that this isn’t a problem that the real world service platforms really care about yet. If I learned that the real reason for feedback was to give users a place to vent steam about bad experiences and make users feel like the company is engaged and listening, I would more than accept the current way in which feedback works; however, I do think there is a big opportunity to dramatically improve the effectiveness of feedback for users, the marketplaces, and workers to drive engagement and quality.