From the article:

"I also think Holy Stone must be doing something to appease unhappy customers in exchange for not providing a negative review. It’s just too good to be true. Just 6% of reviews of the HS100 have 1, 2, or 3-star rating."

So there are nefarious ways to achieve this. But you do not need to do sneaky things to get excellent reviews from pissed off customers. It is easy to assume that the more underhand ways have gotten the good reviews and I am sure you can go to a fake reviews bot to prove the thesis. But it is actually easier and more cost efficient to get those excellent reviews for an average product from pissed off customers by good old customer service.

Most companies have their customer service team at the bottom of the food chain, outsourced and on the minimum wage. From my experience of Google products I suspect that this goes on in a lot of companies that genuinely make wonder products. We all know the story, you struggle to find out how to complain, you struggle filling in an online form and, if you are lucky, you get an automated response. They then make resolution of your complaint as hard as possible, divorce proceedings could be easier.

Most companies don't go the 'full Google' on lousy customer service, however it still takes a while. You get there in the end. They actually have a good product so the complaints are a relatively rare thing for them. Consequently they don't have to major on customer service, the customer service guys are one or two grunts in the company and the whole thing is seen as a cost rather than a revenue centre.

If a company does have a real problem with the product and there are a lot of warranty claims then they have to shape up and get good at customer service. Otherwise they are doomed to go out of business. So they throw people at the problem and more people and are still not winning. The next step is to automate the hell out of it. So you have extremely polite letters sent to customers to get the information needed to process a warranty claim. Customers receive these and the process rolls real quick. They provide required information and the highly automated customer service process just requires some human operator to approve the claim. The warehouse (FBA) then sends the customer out replacement product on the same day. Again, sensible communication goes out and the customer again thinks that for once in their freaking life they have been listened to. Maybe, up until then they have had 'Google grade' customer service and felt left out in the cold. At this point they don't really care so much about the product - most products are commodities anyhow - they just get wowed by the instant response.

There is social engineering in this, the customer can also be led to believe that they are the first person to notice that the 'plastic could be moulded better' and they think that their feedback will be passed along to the 'design team' to help make a better product. They feel involved.

Next the follow up email goes out, asking the customer if their experience with customer service was good enough. By now they have 'bonded' with 'Debbie' or whomever they thought those nice emails were from. They don't realise that 'Debbie' can't spell to save her life and cares more about watching Netflix than their problems with the product. 'Debbie' just clicked a button with automated systems and email templates doing the rest. But because they think they know 'Debbie' they obligingly write a really nice thank you and give five stars. A review is a review, on the site - Amazon or other - there are no silos for reviews breaking them down into 'customer service' and 'product', it all goes into the same pot.

'Debbie' might reject some warranty claims but for these people 'Debbie' can click a different tick box that sends out a discount code for the customer to buy a replacement. So whatever happens, thanks to automation put in place due to the lousy nature of the product, the customer always gets something far beyond what the 'good' companies would do.

These reviews all look formulaic praise for the company because there is a high likelihood that people will write the same stuff, e.g. 'fab, utterly delighted, will buy again'. What else are they going to write?

Then some fake review spotting bot comes along and goes 'ahem... these reviews are all the same!' which implies something dastardly. Nothing dastardly has gone on at all, this is assigning conspiracy when a more plausible explanation is possible. No customers have been bribed, no begging for reviews has gone on, the hustle is far more sophisticated than that.

Obviously there is a lot of product that has to be sent out for warranty claims however, in this customer service model there is no huge team of people weighed down with a massive queue of complaints and not knowing what to do, only to ever let people down. Every complaint is dealt with in real time and there is no backlog.

So then think anti-pattern here. If you can convert 99% of complaints into raving reviews then you kind of need more complaints as that is the best way to get awesome reviews. Happy normal customers don't usually care to write a review, they have better things to do. Pissed off customers that get delightful, not seen before, utterly speedy customer service will go that extra mile and forgive human and product failings to write reviews. These reviews provide the social proof other people need to buy the product. Clearly the product is not better and can't be for this gaming of the system to work.

I am not saying this has gone on in this instance with this product - I don't work for this drone company and have no idea how they work behind the scenes. However I do know that the above technique works and that nobody is going to scan the page to notice 'all these reviews are as a result of customer service'. Even the Google bot won't notice.

Most proper companies don't put the grunts of customer service high up in the food chain, some companies selling so-so commodity items have to. So off-brand products can win reviews remarkably easily with nothing being faked in the underhand ways people with no skin in the game can imagine. I have to say American consumers are the easiest 'marks' for this type of shenanigans, YMMV in Europe.