Turning the air bleu

1st September 2010

Bad products and customer service make Europeans see red

September 2010 – The French have been revealed as the worst offenders for bad language when voicing their opinions on products and customer service, with the Brits and Russians demonstrating they are the most mild mannered.

Statistics from customer review site Reevoo.com show that French reviewers are by far the likeliest to resort to bad language to express their frustrations, swearing 4.5 times more than average. Spain came second, swearing 3.3 times more than average and
Poland came in third. British consumers actually swear 20% less than the average and Russians half the average. When cool-headed Brits do get hot under the collar the most often used insult is ‘rubbish’, with ‘cheap and nasty’ as another popular term.

Reevoo.com has published the stats from the 1.5 million reviews it has collated from its sites in the UK, France, Spain, Poland and Russia. As Reevoo.com checks over each review before it is used, those including swearwords aren’t published, but Reevoo.com has kept a tally of the unpublishable reviews and just what caused customer outbursts.

The most common causes for bad language are mobile phones, making up 18% of reviews containing swearwords, followed by laptops at 13% of unpublishable reviews and poor customer service at 10%.

Visitors to Reevoo.com can see what real customers think of retailers and products they have bought from, safe in the knowledge no offensive language will be creeping onto their screen.

Richard Anson, Founder and CEO of Reevoo.com commented on the findings: “It seems some of the stereotypes about hot-blooded Mediterraneans are true! We encourage our reviewers to be absolutely honest about their experiences and it’s entirely understandable that poor customer service and issues with products make tempers fray.
We are working to introduce a change in our process to let the tiny fraction of reviewers whose comments are rejected make changes to their review, so everyone can benefit from their experiences.”

-ENDS-

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