April 2016 –
Disclaimer: This article was originally researched and written in April 2016. The facts and investigations found then may not be true today (2017+).
Can you trust the Crowd Source Review businesses on-line now to help you find the next best software (help desk or business) These companies are over CROWDED with other review site competitors and appear to be paying to have software product reviews written about product that has never been touched by the reviewer to get the overall site review count up. Think twice about evaluating your next software purchase from Crowd Source Review Sites! Ready my own story below to learn more.
I hate to be the Dear Abby column for exposing high tech false and misleading marketing and declining business ethics of software world, but here we go again.
This time, our fairly straight forward help desk software product line appears to be now part of a crowd source review company scandal that really needs someone looking into this further.
It started a few weeks back when I started getting these messages from a Crowd Source Review site that I had received several more user reviews. I initially thought GREAT.. real users giving review of my software on a Crowd Source Review without my prompting.. what could be better?
I started to look more closely at the user reviews and clearly the reviewers were never a real user and I couldn’t find any reference to any of the reviewers names in my extensive download database of users. The reviews appeared to be created from someone who looked at my website and picked keywords from my own marketing descriptions to create a review that would look fairly authentic.
So I though who is Syed Abuthair? This whole crowd source review model is based on the fact that these are authenticated “linkedIn” real product users? Maybe he is a real Web+Center user?
Although the link to his LinkedIn picture on review site did not work, I did a search for Syed Abuthair on Linked in and found his profile.
I searched for OnLine Task Zone to see if they had every downloaded our help desk software but instead I learned a bit more about their company and their services they provide by researching their company website at: http://www.online-task.com/
There are many, many help desk software vendors like (Freshdesk, spiceworks, ZenDesk, etc) listed on this crowd review website so I thought I would check out some of the other vendors reviews. With just a few clicks of reviews of other software vendor reviews, I see many of the reviews are also authored by the same reviewers as my product reviews.
Just like how you could buy Facebook friends, and likes and Instagrammer followers for a fee, it appears that some Crowd Source Review sites are using the same approach to pad their reviews count. We didn’t pay for these reviews to be created so I suspect the uber competition of crowd source sites is forcing them to find ways to get reviews.
I both emailed and called CrowdReviews.com to let them know that I was concerned about the reviews created for my product and company were false but have not heard back from them.
Do you dare look at other Crowd Source Review sites?
Not all Crowd Source review sites are dishonest!
We have worked closely with G2 crowd , a similar crowd review sourcing company and encouraged our clients to post real reviews on that site.
We currently have 16 reviews of our Web+Center product reviews on the G2 site and we can verify from our database of downloads and clients we have thoughtfully supported and engaged with for years that these are REAL users of the our software and their comments are totally valid. This is the way a crowd review site should be created to maintain a high bar of real and valid product users.