How we handle disputed reviews
November 17, 2012
This week, we had a question come in about how we handle reviews that providers disagree with. This issue has come up before, so I thought I'd take the opportunity to explain our current policy.
Philosophically, how we handle these disputes is a question of transparency and helpfulness. If we knew that a review is undoubtedly true, we would want that review to be publicly available in the interest of transparency. If we knew that a review is undoubtedly false, we want to suppress that information because it would not be helpful to users. Now that we have addressed the two extremes, what about the vast majority of the cases that lie somewhere in between?
First, it's important to understand that there are two types of review information. There are reviews that are found around the web, and there are reviews that are written on DocSpot.com. For the reviews found around the web, our position has been to refer people to the sites that host those reviews. If the original site drops that review, we will as well.
When a provider disputes a review that was originally written on our site, the resolution is slightly more involved. First, we ask the provider to authenticate himself or herself, either by claiming the profile or by some equivalent method. We then attempt to contact the person who left the review to ask for clarification. If things can be resolved, great. If the reviewer does not respond, we feel comfortable taking down the information. If the reviewer does respond and things cannot be resolved, we would like to be able to present both sides of the story by leaving the original review intact and inviting the provider to leave his or her response. We don't presume to be the arbiter of truth and think that consumers would likely find both sides helpful in deciding whether to give any credence to the review. Obviously, it would be great if we knew what happened for sure; however, like other areas of life, things aren't always that clear.
If you have thoughts on how we should modify our current policy to better support transparency and helpfulness, please let us know.