Feedback Isn’t a Yelp Review

Feedback Quandary

Feedback is like fire–it can warm or burn, depending on how it’s delivered. We all receive it in one way or another. But it shouldn’t be something that we fear. It should be something that we take as a constructive experience. Nevertheless, how it is perceived is not always by what is said but by how it is said. Nobody responds well to feedback with the tone and composition of a bad Yelp review.

The Yelp Effect

Yelp was founded in 2004 and has been an online public review site for businesses worldwide. Most of us know Yelp well. It is where we check reviews before trying out a new restaurant or hiring a locksmith. We want to be certain that we have the best experience with any business we patronize.

We fastidiously examine the reviews to know what to expect. We want to know if the business staff is nice, the billing practices are fair, the environment is clean, and many other aspects of the business that would make us feel comfortable going there. On the site, we pause at companies with 5 stars and scroll quickly past those with anything less than 4 stars. Occasionally, we sift through the written reviews to get more granular information about the business. Some reviews praise the business and some outright lambast it.

When Feedback Hurts More Than It Helps

This became painfully real for me when my wife and I ran a small business. Yelp became a source of anxiety and frustration. Because it had such an impact on our business’s reputation and whether people would choose to patronize us, we went out of our way to provide the best care and customer service possible.

However, sometimes things didn’t work out well and we would receive a poor review. The reviews often felt like personal attacks rather than constructive feedback. They could be so scathing and hurtful. The one thing that I realized was that if that person placing the review had only spoken to us and we had a conversation, things could have been reconciled in a collegial manner and everyone would have left the meeting happy.

Let’s Critique How We Critique

Yelp symbolizes a very impersonal experience to me, and I vowed not to give feedback like a Yelp review. Feedback should be very candid, personable, and sensitive. Even a bad critique can be relayed with kindness because a person is on the other end receiving it. This highlights how criticism should be constructive whether good or bad. I couldn’t imagine someone giving the same style of negative feedback in person, as they would on a Yelp review. While Yelp-style reviews may be deemed appropriate online, they have no place in face-to-face conversations. Let’s aim to give feedback not as anonymous critics, but as thoughtful humans invested in each other’s growth.

Have you ever received feedback that stung more than it helped? How would you have given the feedback differently?