How crowd-sourced juries rebalance 'The customer is always right'

Customer experience and satisfaction is front of mind for all successful businesses. Even more so during periods of economic uncertainty, when retaining and growing the customer base is essential.

Handling customer complaints and dissatisfaction can be tricky and time consuming.? Especially when you are more than confident that the customer isn’t right, but they’re still demanding action or recompense, and you need to balance brand reputation with a fair outcome.

But - with what seems to be a changing opinion among society regarding the famous slogan “The customer is always right” - could crowd-sourced juries be the answer we need?

Are attitudes changing towards the slogan ‘The Customer is always right?’?

It certainly feels that way.

It can’t have gone unnoticed that there has been a significant rise in the numbers of “Karen” reels across social media platforms in the last 2 years, attracting thousands of disparaging comments from netizens.??

And those netizens are not just condemning the protagonist but also anyone who suggests kindness be shown, or who offers possible reasons behind the escalated behaviours and vitriolic language caught on camera.?

It would seem that people are growing tired of those who make entitled and rude demands or complaints, brandishing “the customer is always right” as their ‘get out of jail, free’ card??

Review sites are another space where things seem to be changing.?

Where a business might have once feared being judged harshly for any response outside of the standard “we are sorry that we did not deliver our usual standard of excellence’, more and more are responding by refuting customer claims with screenshots, or providing pertinent context omitted by the complainant.?

And, rather than receiving a negative reaction, many businesses have found themselves praised and even celebrated for it, gaining significant numbers of new followers and customers - The Whisk Studio, Cape Town being one recent example.?

The role of crowd-sourced Juries

It’s not a new concept in China, some of the biggest App brands have launched their own crowd-sourced juries in the past 10 years.?

Douyin - a Tik-Tok type App - as an example, has jurors to assist them in enforcing their platform policies, and to screen out content that violates its rules.??

Meituan, China’s leading food delivery App, utilises its 6 Million ‘Little Mei’ crowd-sourced jurors to vote on reviews that its sellers flag as malicious or fraudulent.

Meituan attracted the attention of MIT Technology Review, after a viral post by a Little Mei juror. The juror shared screenshots of some of the more ridiculous customer complaints she’d voted on, on Xiaohongshu - China’s biggest social media platform. Her post generated 20,000 comments and screenshots from other jurors.?

How crowd-sourced Juries work

In the case of Meituan, potential jurors are required to have a verified, active Meituan account, and must vote on 5 simulated complaint tests before they can take part.?

If accepted they will receive a maximum of 3 cases every 12 hours to vote on, with access to the customer’s review, original order, delivery records, and any further information needed to enable them to vote on the case.?

If the jury votes in favour of the restaurant the review is deleted. If they vote in favour of the customer the review stays, and they can enforce a refund.

Alibaba’s juries operated between 2012-2018, processing more than 16 million cases, before the role was discontinued. 1.7 Million jurors were able to vote on complaints about inappropriate behaviour and transaction disputes.?

Alibaba’s screening set-up included a distribution system designed to randomly assign cases, and suspension of any jurors who regularly skipped over cases, as a measure to minimise bias voting.

Whilst Alibaba no longer operates a crowd-sourced jury system, many of its subsidiaries do.

What are the benefits of Crowd-sourced Juries?

Certainly, a quicker decision and outcome is one benefit for the concerned business or seller.?

Law Professor Angela Zhang undertook research of 630,000 cases handled by Alibaba’s jurors and found it took around 73 minutes on average for a jury to reach a ‘verdict’, versus the 3-4 days business days it typically took for Alibaba itself to undertake a review of a complaint.?

Introducing buyer and seller juries opens the door to peer policing. Not just of unfair reviews but also untrue or inappropriate content, and transaction disputes.?

By passing some of these decisions to the platform community to police, it removes the pressure on the business to accept the ‘blame’ and provide compensation, in order to protect the brand image.?

It passes the responsibility of deciding if the customer is ‘in the right’ to their peers and - it would seem - those peers have less patience for people behaving badly, or trying to hustle for freebies, refunds or discounts erroneously.?

So, what are your thoughts?