Reviews are routinely incentivised
Gift cards, account credits, and prize draws in exchange for a review. Platforms disclose that a review was incentivised; almost nobody filters by it, and the effect on the average is not disclosed.
Reviews
Our own research page says we exclude review aggregates from our comparisons because incentivised reviews are widespread enough in this category that the averages do not mean what they appear to mean. It would be incoherent to publish that and then solicit reviews of ourselves.
Tell us your size and industry. We will connect you to a comparable customer, including one where it went badly.
Reviews
None of these are hypothetical, and all four are visible on the major platforms in this category if you look for them.
Gift cards, account credits, and prize draws in exchange for a review. Platforms disclose that a review was incentivised; almost nobody filters by it, and the effect on the average is not disclosed.
Vendors solicit reviews shortly after go-live, when relief is highest. The opinion that matters — eighteen months in, after an upgrade and an audit — is systematically under-represented.
Category positions, comparison placements, and "leader" badges on several major platforms are commercial products. The badge and the score come from different mechanisms and look identical.
A company mid-way through a failed implementation is dealing with the failure, not writing a review. The distribution is missing exactly the observations a buyer most needs.
References, including difficult ones. We will connect you to a customer of comparable size and shape, and — if you ask — to an engagement that went badly. We have had migrations where the reconciliation clock restarted twice and pushed a cutover by a quarter, and a rescue we could not save.
Measured outcomes with the distribution shown. Close length, straight-through rates, and days sales outstanding, measured from production data rather than reported in a testimonial, with the interquartile range published rather than the best case.
An evaluation on your own data. Send several hundred historical transactions with known outcomes and we will score against them before you commit, and show you where it fails. That predicts your experience in a way no review can.
You should — they are not worthless, they are just weaker evidence than they appear. Some ways to read them better:
If a customer writes a review unprompted, that is entirely their business and we will not ask them to change it. What we will not do is manufacture a distribution and then present its average as evidence.
It is real. Buyers filter shortlists by review count and score, and a vendor with forty reviews looks more established than one with four regardless of what the reviews say. We lose consideration that way.
We think that is the correct trade given that we publish a page criticising review aggregates in our comparison methodology. Holding a position only when it is free is not holding a position.
We exclude review aggregates from our own scored comparisons of other vendors, for the same reasons set out above. That is stated on our methodology page, and it is why our directory scores products on functional fit, cost, time to value, implementation risk, extensibility, and ecosystem rather than on what reviewers said.
Questions
It tells you more than forty five-star reviews collected in the week after go-live.