10 Customer Review Pain Points You Should Not Have to Deal With (and Lanternoid’s Remedies for Them)

Lanternoid is a new customer review platform that changes the way the customer reviews are presented to you. We want you to make the most out of a large number of customer reviews quickly, for free.

Most of us search the internet to gather information before buying a book. We might look into our social network, ask a friend, watch some Youtube videos, or search online for book reviews. We might also read customer reviews to find out if others are happy with the book, if it has any limitations, or whether it is the right choice for us. Skimming, looking at star ratings, reading a couple of the negative reviews, trying to detect if positive reviews are genuine, and many other review-reading tricks are pretty familiar to all of us. In the end, this big picture we have formed helps us decide whether to buy the book or to look for something else. Sometimes, we might end up with a book that we are not happy with, even though we put the effort into our research. We might feel sad, angry, or frustrated, thinking about the time and money we have spent, only to find the wrong book. Even if we are happy with the book, we have to realise: We should not have spent that much time going through reviews in the first place!

Unfortunately, the current customer review format has lots of issues that make us waste so much energy on something that should be very simple. Here, I list ten common issues and explain how Lanternoid plans to address them.

1. Going through reviews is time-consuming

Instead of reading reviews, we could be doing something we like, such as being with our friends and families, and boost our energy and well-being.

Lanternoid wants to quickly inform customers about the book they are searching for. Lanternoid summarises the reviews so that people can see the big picture fast. Also, it uses data visualisation to leverage our brain’s ability to perceive images 60,000 times faster than text. Information is categorised into positive, neutral and critical, for fast lookup. You also search among the review data to find specific information.

2. It is impossible to read all the reviews, so we ignore most of them, even important ones

We have no choice, do we? Lanternoid says yes we do! Lanternoid reads all the available book reviews from Amazon and Goodreads and automatically summarises them to inform you as much as possible, pretty fast.

3. We need to see if our needs and wants match the reviewers’

Lanternoid wants to enable you to specify your needs and get ranked results. What is better than having a search based on the criteria you care about?

4. We cannot judge if reviews are honest one by one

We all have heard about the problem of having fake reviews. Lanternoid wants to mitigate the impact of unnatural reviews from its summaries and results. It also wants to give you the control to adjust it based on your needs.

5. Star rating standard changes from one person to another

With star ratings, we need to understand the reviewers’ reason, before considering the rating number. We have seen reviews that have 1-star rating due to late delivery, for example. Some potential buyers might ignore books with less than 4 stars, so you can see how the inaccuracy of star ratings might unfairly affect the author, publishers and also prospective readers.

Lanternoid’s customised score will be computed automatically from reviews, to allow comparing books fairly and accurately.

6. Reviewers’ emotions can have a high impact on the star rating

Each person approaches reviewing differently. Some of us stick to facts, whereas others use emotions like excitement or frustration to write very passionate reviews (positively or negatively). It is important for us to understand all of it: The facts being shared, as well as how the book made it’s reviewers feel.

Lanternoid wants to study and consider both emotions and facts in each review so that you can make informative decision about a book.

7. Reviews get outdated

By using technology and machine learning, Lanternoid enables us to find the trends over the time related to a specific feature on a book, especially if the author is improving their books.

8. Most of us won’t stare at reviews long enough to see trends

What if there are only good reviews on a book? Are they all real? What about the ones with lots of bad reviews? Is it affected by a competitor author? Lots of bad reviews in the past and now lots of good reviews? Did the publisher/author try to bury the bad reviews with good ones, or did they improve the book? We should all be asking these questions. Trust is important and so is finding out if reviews are genuine or not. Having fake reviews is not fair to customers or honest authors and publishers.

Lanternoid collects reviews and wants to build technology to verify reviews to mitigate the risk of collecting fake ones. We can detect suspicious reviews by looking at the content, the language, the behaviour of the reviewer across reviews, the date of reviews on a book, and the type reviews that look fake. Lanternoid strictly bans the generation of fake reviews. Different from most customer review platforms, Lanternoid’s main concern is to empower customers with information.

Lanternoid encourages and supports fair environments between publishers and authors especially self-publishing authors.

Lanternoid will enable them to use better, ethical solutions, such as responding to customers, improving quality and showing updates to customers for transparency.

9. There is no “one review informs all”

Currently, we have to read many reviews to see if we find what we are looking for. But, we might spend a lot of time, and still not find all the answers to our questions. Pretty frustrating.

Lanternoid embraces differences in people’s views. That’s the beauty of life in my opinion that not everyone looks for the same thing. By categorising opposing opinions, Lanternoid shows how many people liked or disliked particular features of a book. This way, if someone does not like a romantic book and writes a negative review, it will not affect your choice the same way few-star ratings do.

10. Writing reviews takes even more time

As customers, we do not write a review in most cases because it just takes too much time and effort. We might write a review if a book gave us extreme happiness or frustration, or if someone asks for it.

Lanternoid is designed to let customers review books faster and easier. Want to say a book is inspiring? Just +1 “inspiring” on its Lanternoid page.

At Lanternoid, we believe that reviewing is a great way to give back to fellow customers.

Learn more about us

I am an entrepreneur and I have been using my tech skills to help people effortlessly discover items they will like, based on their preferences, without being misguided by what companies want them to buy, and without having to do tons of research and work.

Lanternoid has a personalised recommendation system and an algorithm to summarise users’ reviews for books (and, later, other products too).

You can see the beta version of Lanternoid at https://books.lanternoid.com.

If you like the idea and would like to support us, please try Lanternoid :) or clap, share, comment, follow, check our social media, or subscribe to our mailing list at https://lanternoid.com/subscribe for the latest updates on new features, and more.

This has been our first post, and it is a very exciting time! There are so many things I would like to show you about Lanternoid, and I will go over them in future posts.