Angie's List

This is Angie.

And this is Angie's list.

What makes Angie's list different from any other service reviewing site?  A number of things actually...

          For starters, Angie is a real person, and is the actual founder of the company. The article title "At Angie's List, the Reviews Are Real (So Is Angie)" was enough to grab my attention while I was browsing the NYTimes the other day. Simply the feeling that there is a real person behind the operation (which their website makes very clear) is very comforting, it's as if someone is actually looking out for you not just trying to get as many hits on their site as possible.

          I’d never given the site much thought since it offers services that (for now at least) are not relevant to my life. Angie’s List is a website that, overall, is very similar to all the others – it provides user ratings on services to help customers know which companies to trust. Apart from being slightly more specific in scope (they deal mostly with home remodeling and, more recently, health care) the aspect of the company that really sets them apart is that they are a paid subscription service. Most like-minded sites (Yelp for example) are free and rely on that ease of access to get more users. 

         Now, why in the world would anyone pay (and at the rather high cost of $60 per year for most users) for a site when you can just google the same information or use another review site that doesn't charge you anything? The answer - reliability. The concept of "free" with the internet is actually rather new - to the current generation undergraduate students, we do not know of any other kind of internet (where everything from Facebook, to Google, even study guides like SparkNotes are free and disturbingly easy to find). But Angie's list was founded in 1995, before the "free craze" started. 

         But what does Angie's list provide that other like-minded services do not? Here is a great quote taken from the above-mentioned article:

“The anonymity of the Internet renders it inherently susceptible to outright manipulation by unscrupulous service providers and unhappy customers, so consumers have limited means for discerning which information they should trust.”

We have already discussed this in class - even on a site where there are reviews available, we are immediately suspicious of them because no one knows who could have written them. The same article also mentioned this little gold nugget of scandalous information from Roger Lee, a partner at the firm Battery Ventures:

"There are booming businesses overseas that charge you anywhere from $3 to $5 to write a glowingly positive review."

           I have no idea where these companies exist or how they operate exactly, but it's not hard to guess. And it confirms our suspicions - yes, we are still being lied to. I can spend hours on TripAdvisor (which is still a phenomenal site in my opinion) reading the hotel reviews - this is partly because I've noticed that many people (not all, but quite a lot) who write reviews are either in love with the service so they just had to spread the joy, or they're very disgruntled people who had an awful experience and want to vent. As such I try to logically pick my way through the reviews and balance them out, but more importantly, trying to spot the fakes. I've come across reviews that, clearly, did not even belong to that particular hotel that could have come from competitors hoping to decrease their customer ratings (one bad review can seriously lower the TripAdvisor rating, which many people now prefer over the number of stars or the price to make their final decisions).

          As much as possible, Angie's list avoids that kind of problem. It requires a real person with a real name and address (and credit card of course) to register for the service. Their actual names are not listed with their entries, but the mere registration process is enough to drive away a lot of these fast-fix-types who would simply write a bunch of positive or negative reviews. In addition to this, remodeling services are more likely to place an ad on Angie's list where they know people looking for their services will be (which I think is actually kind of useful for the Angie's list users, as they can just search that particular client right there), and all of these advertisers must provide significant discounts to Angie's list members. The author of the NYTimes article said that all the discounts have more than paid for the annual membership (and saved him a whole lot of hassle and expense on bad companies of course - and when it comes to remodeling, a bad company is a really bad company).

         Finally, Angie's list does pretty much everything that Li and Bernoff discuss in Groundswell, particularly listening and talking. Angie herself has semi-regular chat sessions with users who have questions, concerns, or general comments. Her last session was on February 15th, and the session is still online for anyone to read:

You can see that she gracefully deals with both positive and negative comments, and it's wonderful that this is available to non-members as well so they can see for themselves what kind of service this is and if they are interested in joining. The company not only provides comments on other services, but takes comments for its own operation to make it as beneficial as possible to its users. They have effectively created the kind of community Li and Bernoff discuss, and it is still growing. It is a very supportive community of people going through the same kinds of issues that offers a much easier and more trusting way of finding good services. It may even encourage other companies to bump up their services when their competitors are positively reviewed on this kind of reputable site.