Why Ratings Play Such An Essential Part Of The Expert Score
Instantgo allows users to search and find people to connect with in order to get immediate help and answers to their questions and needs.
The quality of service (QoS)
In order to make the service useful, we need to ensure that the recommendations and advices that users get on the platform is relevant and in line with their expectations. This quality of service (QoS) will depend for the most part on the expertise of a particular provider as well as her capacity to communicate and share adequately that knowledge in a specific situation. The technical reliability and the platform’s features will also impact, even if less meaningfully, the overall QoS.
QoS= Provider’s Expertise+ Platform Quality
The expert score
Each user which provides his services on the platform gets a score (we call it the expert score). This instant score is calculated with the help of an algorithm which takes into account a large number of dimensions. Each dimensions having a different weight in the calculation of that number. The higher the score, the more often the system will recommend that particular expert to a user seeking help (in the expert’s category, evidently).
Customer ratings
Although the system will look at variables such as availability, time of response or price rate to compute that score, another important element in the calculation is the provider’s overall rating. Most of the time, a user is the best person to judge the provider’s expertise. That rating that a user provides at the end of each interaction on the platform plays an important role in filtering out the best providers on Instantgo. As more interactions are done with the same provider and more data is accumulated, the score tends to become less variable and more consistent. We can better understand how good that particular provider is and what is its overall rating. It’s key to let users rate each other if we want to be able to get the most objective and useful results. This information cannot be obtained anywhere else.
Expert Score = Behavioural Variables + Overall Rating
Big data
Because we gather a lot of different data, we can also understand what kind of users will most likely enjoy interacting with a specific kind of provider. It helps the system become more intelligent at giving the right recommendations and making the right connections between users. As times goes by, the system is capable of anticipating how good a provider might be even if the amount of data accumulated is still limited. Less interactions are needed for the system to make the right decisions. The overall QoS goes up for users.
In summary, even if rating is not the only measure by which we try to adequately assess the expertise and the quality of a service provider on Instantgo, it is still an essential measure in our calculation of the expert score. Interestingly, we also see that the higher the customer rating of a particular user, the higher is in average the other variables that are used to calculate the overall expert score.
