Why you shouldn’t rely on average review scores alone

If you work in financial services (or any industry for that matter), there’s something very reassuring about a good average review score.

You can see a solid 4.5/5 score and, on the face of it, everything looks fine. So it’s tempting to take the score as a good indication that customers are happy and move on to the next thing.

But the more we rely on that number alone, the more we risk missing what’s actually going on underneath it. That’s because your customers don’t experience your business as an average of everyone else’s experiences. They experience one particular product, one particular journey and often one particular moment that can completely change how they feel about your brand.

A good score can still hide a problem

Take an insurer with a 4.5/5 rating. It sounds like a business that’s doing a lot right, and it probably is. But what if most of those positive reviews are coming from customers who’ve had a very similar experience? You know, the ones who simply bought a policy, didn’t need to claim and renewed it with little fuss.

Now consider the customers who’ve made a claim. Their experience may be very different – they might have experienced delays or a lack of communication. Neither group is wrong; they’ve just seen a different part of the business.

The same could be true for a mortgage provider. Customers who’ve successfully completed their mortgage might leave very positive reviews, while customers earlier in the journey are frustrated by delays or poor communication. When all of those experiences are rolled into one average score, the overall number might still look perfectly healthy.

That doesn’t mean the score is misleading (or not worth shouting about!). It just needs context.

The question shouldn’t just be ‘what’s our score?’

It’s understandable that the headline score gets so much attention. It’s easy to report, benchmark and track over time. But if we only use reviews to answer ‘how are we doing?’, we’re missing one of their biggest opportunities: understanding why customers feel the way they do.

Those are much harder questions to answer from a single number, but they’re also much more useful if your goal is to improve the customer experience.

Perhaps you’re wondering whether you can simply examine complaint data? Well, our research found that 42% of people had experienced frustration with a financial product, bank or provider in the previous year, rising to 69% among Gen Z. Yet only 12% of consumers say they always complain directly to their provider*. That means there’s a sizeable gap between what customers experience and what businesses formally hear about, which reviews can help to fill.

Financial services needs more than a star rating

In financial services, the customer experience is rarely just about whether someone was happy or unhappy.

A customer might give a provider four stars but still say they didn’t really understand the product. Another might be happy with the service but question whether they received good value for money. Someone else might have no issue with the product at all, but be frustrated by how difficult it was to get an answer when they needed one.

That’s why specialist review data is so valuable. At Smart Money People, every review captures 16+ financial services-focused data points alongside the customer’s feedback. That gives companies the opportunity to look beyond the headline rating and understand what is really influencing the customer experience.

Final thoughts

Think of it this way. When a number has that much influence over how a business is perceived, it becomes even more important to understand what sits behind it. That’s where reviews become much more than a reputation tool. They become a source of customer insight, one that can help teams spot issues and make better decisions about where to focus.

Because ultimately, there’s no such thing as an average customer experience – there are millions of individual ones. And if we’re going to ask customers to tell us what they think, we should probably do more than reduce all of those experiences to a single number.

*Smart Money People research, 2025