Did you know you can instantly cut your moving expenses only by reading moving reviews? Here is how we got to this conclusion.
By gathering the data that our users have generated over the course of the existence of our website, we have compiled a very interesting survey that will hopefully shed some light on the usefulness of moving review sites and justify the money aspect of the user-generated reviews that populate our site. After a long data compiling and analysis, we’ve determined the approximate amount of money you save when reading our site and making the smart informed choice. But, before we begin, there’s some important caveats.
![Chart - happy and unhappy customer reviews by price Chart - happy and unhappy customer reviews by price](https://www.mymovingreviews.com/move/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/chart-happy-unhappy.jpg)
How it all started
Before we start, we should clarify that we have divided our survey into two main categories, the first being local moves and the second being long-distance moves. We based the survey on the average prices that these two categories offer, and depending on the grade that our users have given the companies we have determined an additional two sub-categories – reviews with a star rating of 1, 2 or 3, and reviews with a rating of 3, 4 or 5. One might ask “How is putting the middle of the scale, reviews with a rating of 3, in both categories, justifiable?”. We figured out that reviews with a rating of 3 were neither good enough, nor bad enough to be in a certain “black & white” pattern, but we didn’t want to exclude them entirely from the query, and that is why they persist in both categories as a regulative, middle ground statistic. Think of it as a balancing constant.
![cut-moving-costs-local-move cutting moving costs on a local move](https://www.mymovingreviews.com/move/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/cut-moving-costs-local-move-228x300.jpg)
Charts and Graphs
The basic idea behind our survey was to determine the very purpose of our site and turn that purpose into numbers, visible to our audience – moving companies, customers, moving company employees, etc.
It seems logical that a bad company will (usually) cost a person more money than a good one, but contrary to this statement, a load of exceptions appeared during data gathering – it was not uncommon for people to get overcharged and still appear happy about the overall move. Processing such delicate cases was a challenge, but in the end, ratings are subjective according to the personal views of the reviewer, and we wanted to not exclude the subjective element – we preferred it to be the very core of our survey. In the end, what we got was the difference between what our average happy reviewer paid and the sum that our average unsatisfied reviewer had to part with.
The results were outstanding, as you can see from the charts.
What data did we use?
This is the kind of reviews we used:
- Only active reviews – we have an activation system in place to validate the reviews. Every person submitting a review should confirm it by email. Since some of the reviews are not confirmed, we do not display them in the website and we are not using them for this survey.
- Only genuine reviews – we have a filtering system that filters all reviews that we believe are fake, duplicated or not compliant with our terms of service. We do that filtering based on more that 10 factors. We did not include filtered reviews in the survey.
- Excluding reviews with significantly low or significantly high price for the move – we detected some reviews with very low or very high prices. Since we want our data to be more accurate, we decided to exclude reviews that are claimed to cost less than $50 and more than $20 000.
- Reviews within the USA – since we feature companies from around the world, we focused on moves that are performed in US Dollars, because this survey targets the US market.
- The most recent reviews – we wanted our data to be as fresh as possible, so we chose the last 2000 reviews that fit the above criteria to be used for the survey.
We performed the survey on a basis of 2000 reviews, utilizing 1000 queries of both local and long-distance moving reviews to determine the difference in savings in these two separate categories.
Great findings with some interesting data. I will take that into consideration in our moving company and will make sure our customers are referred online to post their feedback.
Great idea.
Contacting your satisfied customers to leave feedback will greatly improve your company image. Let us know how that works for you.