Can we trust the reviews on Trustpilot? | Boardroom Uncovered

People are pretty unfiltered in what they write. It's one of the things that people like about Trust Pilot. There are businesses who read it and go, 'That's really unfair.' And you know, I'm in that position. I read our own Trust Pilot reviews and I often think, 'Come on, that's not fair at all.' But that's the beauty of the product. That's why people trust it. So, it's one of the poorest countries in Africa, one of the poorest countries in the world. And we lived there until I was 11 years old. When we came back to England in 1986, I felt like something of an immigrant stepping into the UK because obviously it's a very different place from Lesotho.

maybe people using ChatGPT to write a review, posting it themselves. It's fake, but it's difficult to pick up.

Great to be here.

Tell me,

There's still time.

What company would you like to write a review of?

Totally. Totally. Yeah, we have a profile. Our rating is 4.2, so could be better, but be honest. Tell us what you think.

It's pretty flat actually so far, but I'm hopeful we can get it up. I mean, if you think about what we do, we're the world's largest independent customer feedback platform. That means that we've got feedback from over a million businesses coming in all the time. And people are pretty unfiltered in what they write. It's one of the things that people like about Trust Pilot. But if you just think about that for a moment, that means that there's quite a lot of people at any given time who are not happy with what's being written on Trustpilot. You know, there are businesses who'll read it and go, that's really unfair. And you know, I'm in that position. I read our own Trust Pilot reviews and I often think, come on, that's not fair at all. But that's the beauty of the product. That's why people trust it. And yes, so we sort of put ourselves in that quite vulnerable position where we're authoritative, we're trusted, but at the same time because it's an open platform, because people are very unfiltered in their feedback, there's at any given time there's a lot of people who are very happy and there are some people who are not so happy.

I do. I do.

Oh, that's a good question. So, I wrote one recently of we were at Blenheim Palace as a family just visiting. And we went to the playground and we'd already paid a lot of money to get in.

And then we had to pay again to get into the playground.

And I thought that's a bit harsh. Come on.

So, I went on to it's one of the beauties of Trust Pilot is you can go on and create a profile of a company if one doesn't already exist as a consumer. So the company doesn't have to have invited you, you can just go and do that, and I left that feedback for Blenheim Palace. Now very nicely, I think they replied to my review and they gave their side of the story, and that's what I think is really nice when businesses take the trouble to listen, people realize no company is perfect, but when the business actually takes the trouble to listen and say something back about their perspective, that's how companies build trust by doing that in a nice, open, unfiltered way.

Indeed. He was there. Yeah. So, it is kind of ironic. So I was at Harvard Business School doing an MBA from 2002 to 2004. That is exactly the time that Mark Zuckerberg was down the road at the faculty of arts and sciences as an undergrad starting to start Facebook. And you know, we actually had something at Harvard called the Facebook which was each bit of Harvard had its own directory of everyone's profiles. And Zuckerberg was down the road figuring out how to stitch all those together and make it something way better than what you got out of the box. And it I always find it ironic that, you know, we were sitting there in the business school thinking about how to run businesses and do all of those things. Meanwhile, there's this kid down the road who's like actually doing it in an amazing way. But I didn't teach Mark, but I did have a class of undergrads and the course that I taught, EC10, was one of the mandatory courses. So it's a course that Zuckerberg would have taken. One of my colleagues would have been teaching him, but it wasn't me.

Indeed. Indeed. You could have been walking past him on the street or waiting in line for a coffee.

Yeah, definitely. Let's say so after that you went to Nepal, correct? Yeah. So, I went to Nepal actually twice. A lot of people in their internships at business school want to go and work for banks and consulting firms and all that. I had always worked in tech. I knew that I wanted to work in tech afterwards. I actually kind of knew that I wanted to work for Google afterwards and so I wanted to do something a bit different. I grew up in Africa as a kid. And we'd actually done a case study at business school on a nonprofit based in Nepal called Population Services International. And I was really inspired by their work. So I went for my summer internship first time round. I went off to work for them and enjoyed it so much. And they liked some of the work that I'd done. I went right back there after business school and I was actually interviewing for Google from Kathmandu on a very dodgy phone line trying to get a proper job in California which ultimately I did.

I think it says something about Google as a company that they liked the fact that I was out there doing something I believed in. No doubt they were interviewing a lot of people and I think that helped to maybe make me a bit different. The fact that I'd worked in tech but now I really believed in something and I'd gone to Nepal and I was so the first thing I did was I said look I'm really sorry but there's going to be a big delay on the line so you'll have to wait a few seconds after I say something and then I'll have to do the same for you so this might be a bit of a stilted conversation but I've got an excuse and here's what it is so yeah.

That's kind of what was happening. There was no delay at all actually. There was no AI at the time so I couldn't look it up on Gemini or whatever. But that was quite a jarring thing like going from a nonprofit in Kathmandu and I went straight from there to the Google Plex in Mountain View and started working there and that was quite a jarring transition as you can imagine.

So have you ever heard of Lesotho? Well you have now. So, Lesotho is one of only two countries in the world that are completely surrounded by just one other country with no coastline. Lesotho is one of them. Do you know what the other one is? If you counted Vatican City, that is the other one. Yes, you nailed it. You nailed it. Well done. Yeah. So, it's about the size of Wales. And if you look on a map, it's the thing that's a different color right in the middle of South Africa. Okay. So, it's one of the poorest countries in Africa, one of the poorest countries in the world. My dad was working out there training teachers and we lived there until I was 11 years old. So, actually when we came back to England in 1986, I felt like something of an immigrant stepping into the UK because obviously it's a very different place from Lesotho. So, I guess shades of going from Kathmandu to Mountain View but at a younger age. Yeah.

Totally. Well, it was the UK that seemed abnormal to me, right? Because all I could remember really was Lesotho and how things were there. So coming into this place was like, oh, it's a bit weird. Everything's a bit different.

That's right. Peter Mühlemann. Yeah. He's a great friend of mine.

Yeah. Must be, I imagine, a little bit daunting. I don't know if daunting is the right word, but it's certainly a challenge when you come into a company that's so used to being run by one person that's only ever been run by one person. You know, it's a bit like stepping into someone else's family as the head of the family when you haven't met anyone before and it's all a bit different. Now, I think what you've got to do and this was the second time that I'd replaced a founder in my career. I think what you've got to do in a situation like that is first of all deeply understand and get to know the founder themselves. And Peter is a wonderful person and couldn't have been more welcoming, more supportive of me and more helpful, you know, behind the scenes in giving me advice, giving me his perspective on stuff. And I've really become close friends with Peter over the last couple of years. So Peter himself has been amazing about it. But I think what you got to do is come in with a real humility in those situations. So, you know, you can't walk in saying, 'Right, here's how we did things at Just Eat or here's how we did things at Google or whatever.' You've just got to really understand the situation you're in, understand the people, the culture, not start rushing into decisions, but just come in with that humility. And one of the first things I did was I ran listening sessions with every trustee, as we call them, every employee around the company, around the world. And I spent several months doing sessions of 15 to 20 people and that was really just about listening to them and listening to their perspectives. What I felt that did was it helped me to build trust with them. It gave them a sense of who I was but it also gave me a very rich sense of the issues that were coming up around the company and it meant that it was the best possible induction I guess into the challenges facing the business and the opportunities. And it meant that when I started to say things about strategy and direction, I felt like I was doing it having really taken the trouble to understand the situation. It takes a lot of patience, a lot of humility to do that, but I felt that was very important.

Yeah. Tell you your baby's ugly or whatever.

So, what I was really heartened by actually is I've actually done this twice now. I did it so I've been in the business nearly two years now. I did it just a few months ago again going around most of the business not quite 100% but doing listening sessions in groups with many people and what I was really pleased about was that second time round people were if anything even more honest and candid with me than they'd been first time round and I was actually really heartened by that because in any great company you need absolute candor and transparency. People need to be honest with each other, have the right conversation, the genuine conversation. If there's a hidden agenda, unhide it somehow and get it out on the table. And I felt that second time round, I mean, first time around, people were doing that to some extent. Second time round to an even greater extent. And I think that's testament to the kind of culture we have at Trust Pilot where we really believe in transparency and candor.

All right. I'll do my best.

I'm actually going to have to say two things because they were at the same time. So, neither of them quite came first. But I grew up in Nottingham after Lesotho, and as soon as I left school, as soon as I was old enough to get a job, I had no money at all. I went to work in a shoe shop called Round Pounds on Clifton Estate in Nottingham, which is one of the bigger council estates in the UK. And I worked at the same time in a bar. And the bar stayed open till 3:00 a.m. The shop opened at 9:00 a.m. And I was working the longest hours I've ever worked. Literally only six hours in between one job ending and the next one beginning because I just wanted to earn what I could. My salary was £2.19 an hour in the shoe shop. This is pre-minimum wage and all that kind of thing.

No workplace pension. Yeah. But I just at the time I just really wanted to have a bit of money to travel and that was the only way I could find to get it.

I'm going to have to say my wife. And she'll be pleased. I hope so. But it's true. I mean, she went through a terrible situation in 2019. She had stage three breast cancer. It was as you can imagine the most horrible thing. Chemotherapy, radiotherapy, surgery, you know the lot. It was really there was a lot of risk at first. We were very worried about it and she completely got through that. Amazing courage and has gone on now. She works as a psychotherapist. She's helping for the NHS, helping young people with some very serious problems. And I just find that deeply inspiring. As someone who's faced such challenges themselves, has got through it and is now helping others who have their own challenges. I just find that amazing.

Everything's fine now. Yeah. I probably wouldn't be mentioning it if it wasn't. That's true. Okay.

So, I think it would be David Attenborough. And I say that because he's pretty much in the UK the most trusted person we've got. And trust is everything for us. You know, our vision is to be the universal symbol of trust. I think having someone with his kind of experience around the board table giving his perspective, his color on things going on in our business, I would find that absolutely fascinating.

I think the best thing is the journey we take businesses on. You know, if I think of companies, a lot of them don't listen to their customers enough or they think they understand their customers, but they actually don't. And what Trust Pilot does, a colleague of mine sent me a video earlier that one of our customers has made of their employees celebrating their Trust Pilot score going up and their reviews getting better. And I just think the way Trust Pilot engages companies to really pay attention to their customers, to celebrate the successes, to celebrate the wins. You know, I speak to CEOs. I read our Trust Pilot reviews. I speak to CEOs who say they do the same. And that's just amazing to be taking companies along that journey.

I would be a not very successful professional pianist. And I say that because in Lesotho, we didn't have a telly, but we had a neighbor who left his front door unlocked and had a piano. I used to go around to his house and play. My mom is an amazing pianist and she plays a bit of piano as well. And so I gradually really got into the piano and if I've got any time now, that's what I love to do. So yes, I'm not sure how many people would pay money to listen to me, but that's what I would love to do.

Indeed. Indeed. You never know.

I think and this is a bit Trust Pilot centric but I think I would really go after businesses that try to mislead consumers and the whole ecosystem that supports them. I'll give you an example. There are companies out there who will try to deceive review businesses and sell businesses fake feedback. And I just think that is deeply wrong. We do what we can at Trust Pilot to go after businesses like that legally. We have a legal team. We've taken legal action. We've had a successful UK court case against a business that does that kind of thing. So, we're doing absolutely everything in our power to go after those bad actors. But if I was prime minister, I would have a lot more power to go after those bad actors and make sure that they suffer consequences. And by doing that, you know, the chancellor says his top priority is economic growth, right? Because that's how you pay for the NHS and public services and everything else. Well, this is people trying to throw grit into the economy, right? Because great reviews, genuine reviews mean that more transactions happen. They happen between the right people. They happen faster. So, we're doing our bit to help drive growth and there are bad actors out there who are trying to stop it. And I would go right after them.

You know, there's a lot of talk about fake reviews. You mentioned it before also, you know, AI bots, maybe people using ChatGPT to write a review, posting it themselves. It's fake, but it's difficult to pick up. You've said it before, you know, you want to be seen as this elevated company, this trusted source of reviews. Can that really be achieved? It can. And we are. So, you know, people are voting with their feet or with their mouse clicks. More and more people are using us every month because they see us as a trusted source. And when I read our own Trust Pilot reviews, a lot of people are saying just that in their Trust Pilot reviews. So yes, and why is that? Because we go to enormous lengths to ensure that the content on Trust Pilot is trustworthy. We have more than 350 million reviews on our platform. Every one of those reviews has metadata attached to it. So things like what time of day was it written on, what operating system, what country, many other things. Because we have so many reviews, we can look for suspicious patterns in that data. So even if people are writing text using AI, there's so much other stuff that we can look at to decide is a review trustworthy or not. We have about 200,000 new ones coming into Trust Pilot every day and we have to decide in the moment which ones are genuine and which ones are we going to allow onto the platform. So I would say we have guidelines. We use technology to detect what shouldn't be on the platform. We also have a flagging system. So if you think something's suspicious, you can flag it. We'll investigate it. And as I say, we go after bad actors. We work with regulators to do everything in our power to make the content trustworthy. Of course, the thing to compare it to is social media because you know, social media, all of those things I've just described largely do not exist on social media. So people are talking about businesses on all the social media platforms. Do you have the same guidelines and controls and enforcement? You generally don't. So we have a very important role to play and that's our vision is to be the universal symbol of trust.

We have a two-hour window right after you post a review during which we use our systems to check it and if we don't think it's legit then it won't go onto the platform at all. So no one would ever see that review. Now we'll never be perfect with all the volume that's coming in, we don't claim to be perfect. And that's why we have a flagging system afterwards where people can flag something that's suspicious and we've got technology. We've got people that will then go and investigate. So that's kind of the system and how it works.

A couple of things there. So firstly, companies shouldn't and our widgets as we call them don't allow them to showcase reviews that are well below their actual score. So you shouldn't mislead people and that's something the regulators are very clear on that people shouldn't have misleading presentation of reviews. And of course with our genuine widgets, with the things that we provide to companies, you can easily click through and see their actual Trust Pilot profile and read all their feedback on Trust Pilot. So you don't have to just look at the ones that they've put up. You can click through. You can use our site to search just for the one-star ones if you want to see what the unhappy people are saying and you can check all that out. So the principle is we want to be as transparent as possible. And how does Trust Pilot compare to something like Google reviews? Businesses talk all the time that you can have a negative review on Trust Pilot or Google Reviews and it could tank the overall score. Google of course will try and force people towards their own platform. How would you as a company take on that competitor?

Indeed on the Footsie, we're in the Footsie 250.

Indeed. Yeah. So I think it suits Trust Pilot very well. I mean I've had experience in all different environments. I've done venture. I've done private equity at Just Eat. Of course, we listed while I was there in 2014. So I had listed experience there as well. I think for our business being in the public domain, being very transparent about who we are as a business and our financials and issuing an annual report. We also do a trust report every year. We released that just a few weeks ago. It's important to us that we are very transparent about the business, who we are, how we work, and so I think it's actually for us in particular at Trust Pilot, it's very appropriate that we're on the public market.

We're very happy on the LSE. As I said, we entered the Footsie 250 recently. We find that we're getting a great reception from investors. We have an amazing business model software as a service. So we're not an advertising business. We make our money over long-term contracts with businesses for things like the analytics products to really understand their reviews. And we're finding investors in London see that as a really exciting distinctive position. We're also having a lot of success attracting international investors. So around 40% of our investors are in the US. And we're finding American investors are very open to investing in a successful tech business on the London Stock Exchange.

I think there's certainly more we can do as a country to attract and grow technology businesses and, you know, evidently the US has been amazingly successful at doing that. I am very keen that more great tech businesses get built in this country. I'm obviously a Brit myself, so I care a lot about the success of Britain and the sector here. And we're doing our bit for that, right? We're a very successful London listed technology business with a huge international opportunity. We have paying customers in more than 100 countries globally. We've got about 70 million unique users a month of our web properties. Billions of people see Trust Pilot every month on Google. So, we've got absolutely massive reach. We've got a huge opportunity ahead of us and I think the London Stock Exchange could do with more businesses like us frankly.

Well, for us in particular, I think going after bad actors who are making markets less efficient would be a good place to start. I think there's a whole set of proposals about how to make the London Stock Exchange itself more successful, how to make it easier for businesses to list and raise capital. And I'm always happy to see the government doing that kind of thing.

Well, I think most business people would tell you that what they want is more stability, more predictability. And you know, we all in business deal with uncertainty every day but there's a level of uncertainty in terms of government interest rates, growth, debt, all that kind of thing which ultimately businesses don't want to see. Businesses want to operate in a stable predictable environment so that we can deal with our own challenges and our own risks in the right way. So look, I'm a great supporter of the growth agenda, getting economic growth going in the UK. I think we play a big role in that through reviews. 89% of people look at reviews before making a purchase. And so, as I said earlier, we're helping people to buy things from the right people more quickly than they otherwise would. And so we're doing our bit to drive growth ourselves ultimately. Are you optimistic about the state of the UK economy?

I'm optimistic that we're going to continue to grow. I think the overall macro picture, you know, there are plenty of commentators out there who spend their lives looking at this stuff. So, you know, I would listen to them on that. But certainly what we're showing is that our most recent announcement was that we grew our UK business by 15% year on year. The economy, I know, is not growing by 15%. That would be nice if it was. But I think what we're showing is that if you play your cards right as a business, you can grow very rapidly within this environment. And I would love to see more companies doing that. And I'd love to do our bit as Trust Pilot to help companies understand their customers and get closer to what's really going on in their businesses by listening to Trust Pilot feedback so that they can become more successful as well.

So, I think policies that drive economic growth are ultimately going to be helpful to businesses in the UK. Exactly what the right policies are, I'm not a commentator on that stuff, but I would say in our particular area, the thing that would help the reviews industry is government support in going after bad actors. So, there's a whole infrastructure. There's people that try to deceive consumers through fake reviews. There is an infrastructure that supports them. You know, payment companies, marketing companies that promote their services through. We should be going after those things in the interest of driving growth because they're trying to deceive people. And we're doing our bit by having a fair system with all the guidelines and technology that I talked about to do our bit to say, let's have really trusted, genuine reviews, but we could do with the government going after some of these bad actors as well.

And you want one thing? Well, as many things as you want. I mean, there probably is more than one thing, but I would start with humility. I think as CEO you are covering a lot of ground. You manage everything in the company so the sales people, the marketing people, the legal team, the technology, etc. There's no CEO in the world who can be an expert on all of those things. You have to have the humility to listen to the people you've got and take on board what they're saying and not just willy-nilly go off in some arbitrary direction. You also need the humility to be curious about areas you don't understand. And one of the things I love about the role of CEO is you are constantly learning about new things. You're seeing problems, challenges, opportunities, and you want to dive into them more and learn. And you know, you mentioned earlier I taught at Harvard. You know, one of the things you learn there is a lot of curiosity, a lot of intellectual curiosity about what is going on in the world. So, this is one of those jobs where I think as a good CEO, you have to have the humility to say, 'I'm not an expert in a lot of these things. I'm going to have the curiosity to ask the question, listen to the answer, and then there's a lot you can do with what comes back.' I, as I say, love the role of CEO. I think I don't have a lot of time for people, you know, CEOs who sort of wallow in how difficult the job is and the pressure and all the rest. I think there are huge privileges that come with this position: the ability to make an impact on the world, the ability to shape the culture of an organization in a way that helps it to do better, but also helps the people there to be happier, go further in their careers. So, I think it's a huge privilege doing jobs like this. But it starts with humility to actually listen to other people and learn.

Pleasure. Thanks a lot.