Our competitor had 4.4. We had 3.8. Six months later we were ahead — without buying a single review

The gap I thought I understood

We provide IT support to small businesses in one region. There are two serious firms in our area and we are one of them. For a long time, whenever we lost a pitch, the prospect would say some version of the same thing: they had looked us both up, and the other firm had the better rating. 4.4 against our 3.8. On a shortlist of two, that decides it.

I took it personally, and I took it as feedback. We changed our ticketing, we added a weekend line, we sent satisfaction surveys. Our own survey scores were excellent. The public rating did not move. That mismatch should have told me something sooner than it did.

Reading our own profile properly

One evening I exported every review we had, all 52, into a spreadsheet, with the reviewer name, the date, the stars and the first line. Then I went through them with our client list open in the other window.

Forty-one were from real clients and were broadly fair, including a couple of two-star reviews we deserved at the time. Seven were one-star. Of those seven, three were from genuine clients with genuine complaints. The other four were not clients at all.

One complained at length about a software product we have never sold, and named a company with a similar name to ours based two hundred miles away. One was from a person whose only connection to us was that they had interviewed for a job and not got it. Two came from accounts created within a day of each other, three weeks after we had let a member of staff go, and both described “incidents” that had never happened to any client we could identify.

Four reviews. On a profile of 52, four one-star reviews that should not have been there were worth about a quarter of a star. More importantly, two of them were the first thing anyone saw when they sorted by lowest rating, which is what a prospect comparing two firms does.

The arithmetic, honestly

I want to be careful here, because the easy version of this story is “we removed some reviews and won”, and that is not quite what happened.

Removing the four moved us from 3.8 to 4.0. That is real, and it took us out of “Average” and into “Great”, but 4.0 still loses to 4.4. What the removals really did was fix the floor. The reviews that had been describing events that never happened were gone, and the one-star reviews that remained were ordinary, answered, and old.

The rest was work we should have been doing all along. We started asking every client for a review at the close of every ticket that went well, with a link, by email, the same day. No incentives, no cherry-picking, just asking. Over five months that produced 56 new reviews averaging a little under 4.8. The average of 108 reviews came out at 4.5.

The firm across town stayed at 4.4. They were not doing anything wrong; they simply were not asking. For the first time, on a shortlist of two, the number favoured us.

How the removals actually went

I filed the first one myself, the wrong-company review, and it came down because the mismatch was obvious once pointed out: the product named in the review was not something we sell, and the company named was not us.

The other three I got wrong twice before getting them right. My first reports were a paragraph each about how unfair it all was. Both were declined. The platform does not act on unfairness; it acts on grounds. The ground for the ex-employee reviews was that the reviewers had no genuine experience as customers, and the evidence for that was our client records, the account creation dates, and the timing. Written up as a single case, with the documents attached, both came down once Trustpilot had reviewed it. The interview-candidate review followed on the same ground.

I used a specialist for that second round, because I had run out of patience and I was no longer confident I knew what the platform needed to see. I would do the same again.

What changed in the business

We stopped losing shortlist decisions on the rating. I cannot prove that every win since is down to the number, but the sentence “we looked you both up” has not been said to us as a reason for a no in over a year.

And something less measurable: the team stopped feeling judged by reviews that described things they had never done. That turned out to matter more than I expected.