There’s a funny thing about review scores. The better they are, the less likely we are to question them.
If a company is sitting at 4.5 out of 5, it’s easy to look at that number and think everything must be working pretty well. And broadly speaking, it probably is. A strong score is something to be proud of, particularly in financial services where customers have high expectations and a poor reputation can quickly become a barrier to winning new business.
But a healthy score doesn’t necessarily mean there’s nothing to fix. Sometimes, it just means the problems are being averaged out.
NOT EVERY CUSTOMER SEES THE SAME BUSINESS
Think about the different ways someone might interact with an insurer. One customer buys a policy, never needs to contact the provider and renews the following year. Another has to make a claim after an accident and suddenly needs regular updates, clear answers and reassurance that everything is being dealt with. They’re both customers of the same business, but their experiences can be worlds apart.
The same applies across financial services. A mortgage customer who has reached completion may have a very different view of a provider from someone who’s still waiting for an application to progress. A savings customer who has never needed support may have little in common with someone who has spent an afternoon trying to get an answer to a question about their account. Yet all of those experiences can end up contributing to the same headline review score.
That’s why a good average can sometimes give a false sense of security. Not because the number is wrong but because it doesn’t tell you where that number has come from.
REVIEWS CAN TELL YOU MUCH MORE THAN WHETHER CUSTOMERS ARE HAPPY
This is where it’s worth changing the conversation around reviews. Rather than treating them purely as a way of measuring satisfaction, think about what customers are actually giving you when they leave feedback.
They’re telling you what happened to them, what mattered, what frustrated them and what they think could have been done better. Those patterns are difficult to see if the focus is simply on whether the overall score has moved from 4.4 to 4.5.
And there’s another reason not to rely too heavily on what gets formally reported. Our research found that 42% of people had experienced frustration with a financial product, bank or provider in the previous year, rising to 69% among Gen Z. Yet just 12% of consumers say they always complain directly to their provider*.
In other words, a customer doesn’t have to make a complaint for something to have gone wrong. Reviews give financial services companies another opportunity to hear those experiences.
CONTEXT MATTERS IN FINANCIAL SERVICES
There’s also a bigger point here about the type of information businesses collect. A generic review score might tell you that a customer gave you four stars. It doesn’t necessarily tell you whether they understood what they were buying, whether they felt they received good value or whether they were happy with the service they received when they needed help.
A four-star review from someone who found a product easy to understand is telling you something very different from a four-star review from someone who was happy overall but still felt the terms and conditions were confusing.
That’s why specialist review data can be so valuable. At Smart Money People, every review captures 16+ financial services-focused data points alongside the customer’s feedback, helping companies understand the different factors shaping the experience rather than reducing everything down to a single rating. It gives you more context around the score and more opportunity to spot where something might need attention.
FINAL THOUGHTS
There’s no argument that review scores matter. Our research found that 74% of people read reviews before switching financial providers, while financial services firms need an average rating of 4.1 out of 5 just to be considered by customers. So companies should definitely care about maintaining a strong rating.
But we shouldn’t treat the score alone as the final verdict on the customer experience. The reviews behind it can tell you which parts of that experience are working, which aren’t and where there might be an opportunity to do better.
Because ultimately, the aim of collecting customer feedback shouldn’t just be to end up with a number you can put in a report. It should be to understand what your customers are experiencing well enough to do something with it.
And sometimes, the most valuable thing a review can tell you isn’t why someone gave you five stars. It’s why they didn’t.
