EMURGO – a global blockchain solutions provider & a founding entity of Cardano – is committed to delivering efficient solutions to enterprises & organizations leveraging the benefits of blockchain technology. One of the strongest utilities of blockchain solutions is the ability to provide immutable data records in an automated and secure way. This immense benefit will ultimately lead to the creation of a variety of use cases in both the public and private sectors.
Use Case: Lack of Trust & Transparency with Centralized Review Platforms
When customers are looking for a good local restaurant or bar, it’s rather inconvenient to spend lots of one’s own time on finding different places. Instead, most will choose to search on restaurant review sites or applications to save time. On these review sites or applications, customers can easily check restaurant rankings, trends, and select the best places based on past customer reviews.
However, in recent years, people have been increasingly questioning the scores of major restaurant review sites. Some restaurants have even claimed that they had been on the receiving end of unfair business threats such as a lower review score if they had refused to pay a certain amount to a popular review platform. In fact, Japan’s Fair Trade Commission announced it had begun an investigation into online restaurant review sites in 2019 to see if there had been any such activities.
Although site & application-specific names have not been publicly disclosed, it seems that major applications in Japan such as “Tabelog” and “GuruNavi” are on the list. There are valid customer & restaurant skepticisms that an individual restaurant’s overall review scores are based on how much that restaurant pays in annual fees to a site’s/application’s operator. There are beliefs that restaurants which refuse to pay the annual fee are given a limited maximum cap on their review score even though there are excellent reviews on other sites.
Blockchain Solutions Provide Trust & Immutable Data
Blockchain is simply a shared online database that cannot be tampered with. In the situation above regarding review platforms, if any user could simply access the database to see the history of actual customer reviews & information, individual restaurant responses & comments, unfounded complaints, and the actions of the site operator, then users & participating restaurants would immensely benefit. Blockchain technology through its abilities to provide data immutability and transparency, vastly increases customer confidence and also adds value to company brands at the same time.
Blockchain solutions can be applied not only to restaurant review sites but also to any other user review site including travel, social media, etc. By preserving information transparency & reliability, customers can trust the information they are accessing which is highly valuable and companies can focus solely on developing more value-added services to their customers. It’s a win-win for customers & companies by leveraging blockchain’s unique value proposition to provide verified trust and immutable data.
Conclusion
In order for blockchain to become interwoven into society, it needs to have a legitimate use case and offer a more efficient solution to a problem. There needs to be gradual awareness of how blockchain provides value over existing systems.
Enterprises value their customers and customers access services from enterprises they trust. EMURGO as a global blockchain solutions provider is conscious of blockchain technology’s unique value proposition and the better solutions it can provide for real use cases such as user reviews.
Recently, EMURGO developed and launched EMURGO Traceability Solution – a blockchain-based solution to track supplies from origin to customer. In this instance, EMURGO partnered with Blue Korintji – a local Indonesian coffee brand – to address a real use for tracking the source of coffee beans from farm to cup and shed transparency on coffee bean purchasing prices so that coffee farmers can track their products through the supply chain.
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