Good Garage Scheme feedback survives complaint

30 July 2014  

The Good Garage Scheme has been vindicated by the Advertising Standards Authority after a complaint about its feedback system was not upheld.

The scheme was subject of a single complaint from a customer who believed that only positive feedback was published, while also believing that the feedback total published on the website would mislead people into thinking that was the total amount of published feedback. However Forte, the company behind the scheme, was able to demonstrate its procedures and highlighted the work it goes into when a negative feedback comment is posted.

Responding to the complaint, Forte told the ASA that all feedback was kept on an administrative website allowing for an accurate count of 650,731 feedback comments, of which garages were rated based on the scores received by them. The company also provided the ASA with two examples of pages containing negative comments, one of which had allowed a workshop to utilise its right to reply. Forte had also placed the complainants comments as pending while they conducted a review of the service, with the garage affected questioning some of the points – a move which the complainant did not respond to.

The ASA ruling states: “We considered that consumers were likely to assume that the number on the counter related to all feedback submitted and accepted under the terms of the site, and that reviews would not be selectively published on the basis of their positivity. We noted that the acceptable use policy of the site required factual statements made by users to be accurate, and understood that GGS had a system in place to verify complaints made in feedback before it was published. We considered that it was reasonable to hold the feedback from being published while specific comments were investigated, without this amounting to selective publication, and that the refusal of the complainant to proceed with this process was justifiable grounds to decide not to publish the feedback, especially as many points were contested by the garage. We noted that GGS had demonstrated that there were negative reviews for some of the garages on the scheme, that aggregate scores could fall below five stars and that the total on the counter was equal to the total number of reviews accepted onto their system for publication.”

The ruling highlights the effectiveness of the scheme and its feedback system, as well as how it can work to give members more feedback based on customer reviews.