The Likert Scale has been in popular use for decades but it cannot be the end state of product reviews. There are drawbacks for both buyers and sellers. As a buyer, I don’t have an intuition for what two stars mean compared to three; if you ask around, people who do will disagree with each other about what exactly three stars signifies. For sellers in competitive markets, 5 stars has become the baseline for satisfactory reviews: any less is a problem. Knowing this changes my behavior: I’m hesitant to give 4-star reviews unless I have a real problem with the product.

CX professionals know that users are unlikely to answer post-call surveys unless they are pissed. I’ve read a lot of Amazon reviews that start “I don’t normally leave reviews, but this was so good it blew me away…” A proper replacement will increase the likelihood you bother to leave a review. Part of this friction is that we aren’t sure what we are rating.

The product has not been reviewed yet. Submit your feedback to say how your experience compared to your expectations of the product.

If you’ve taken a post-call or post-chat surey, the prompt will say “on a scale of one to 5, where one means X and five means Y…” because without well-defined extremes, it’s very hard to interpret a Likert scale. Otherwise, the caller may not even know what end of the spectrum is good!