Reviews are more than a star rating

We tend to reduce online reviews to two numbers:

How many reviews does the business have?

And what's the average star rating?

But there's much more information inside them.

Read enough reviews of a business and patterns start appearing.

Customers describe what the company does well. They mention employees by name. They talk about problems that were solved, how they were treated, what surprised them, and why they would come back.

In other words, customers are describing the business in their own language.

That's valuable to someone deciding whether to call.

It's also increasingly useful to search engines and AI systems trying to understand what a business is known for.

Businesses obviously need to pay attention to their rating and the number of reviews they receive.

But I think the words inside those reviews may become just as important.

A business's reviews may be one of the clearest descriptions of the business that the business didn't write itself.