What if they say something bad about us?

In April 2009, we first added a ’reviews’ function to the website of our flagship museum Milestones, allowing visitor comments in the style of Tripadvisor. It now seems an appropriate time to give a quick and unscientific overview of the last year.

 Apart from a low-key press release, we launched the function without fanfare, and after a slow start visitors began adding their personal reviews about their visit. We then added the functionality to all the community museums operated by the County Council, as well as for Arts Centres, Discovery Centres and Country Parks.

Users were asked to provide a name, email, write free text comments and were able to give a star rating 1-5. All reviews are moderated prior to publication, and whether good or critical would be published. We ‘reserve the right’ to edit, but have not yet had to amend any submission. Poor grammar and spelling are left as submitted. We will reply, if only to apologise for an error on our part, to correct a misunderstanding or explain why something happened the way it did.

So how did it go?

Our local community museums rarely received reviews. This may be because they get fewer visits and are free, or maybe don’t engage in the same way as a large museum. Milestones, however, was a different matter.

To date Milestones has received 92 published reviews. Favourable reviews predominate, from a single sentence to fairly lengthy considered comments. Whilst it is reassuring to receive positive reviews, it is the negative ones  from dissatisfied customers which are significant and give us insight into how visitors really perceive the services we offer.

There were a number of mixed, poor or very poor reviews where customers were obviously quite cross. It’s impossible to know how many of these complaints might have been made if the reviews function was not available, but I would guess that a large proportion of visitors would not have complained had we not made it easy for them to do so.

I’m not going to copy any reviews here as you can read them for yourself.

The bulk of negative reviews centered around the museum catering. While it’s impossible to please all the people all the time, the museum cafe certainly pleased too few. But the regular complaints about the catering meant that improvements had to be, and were made. Replies were published and where we had an email, personal replies were also written.

Occasionally unenthusiastic reviews were countered with a subsequent positive one, where the visitor disagreed with the previous reviewers opinions.

At one of our Country Parks, a small group of locals obviously banded together to send a number of complaints about new park signage… we had to say that we’d got the message and not to submit further comments on the subject.

In March 2010 we released the second iteration of the review software, where we made all fields mandatory. A valid email address had to be provided but was not published and we dropped the star rating. When spurious submissions came in and were rejected, the star rating was already recorded in the system, giving misleading results. Users also appeared to forget to rate, so good reviews often received the default single star.

Publishing both the good and the bad online for all to read was a fundamental change of culture for the County Council. The project had directorial support and although initially there was some staff reluctance to allowing reviews on the website… ‘what if they say something bad about us?’…but the sky didn’t fall and since then the topic has rarely been mentioned.

We will continue to offer the opportunity for users of our services to comment in the public arena. It is an open and honest way for the public sector to engage with users and ought to improve the standard of the services we provide.