6,838 Negative Moving Company Reviews: A Model Classified 65.0% of 6,837 Labelled as Mainly About How the Company Is Run

A model classified the main reason in 6,837 one- and two-star Google reviews of 294 high-review-count moving companies in eight U.S. metros

TAMPA, FL, UNITED STATES, October 6, 2026 /EINPresswire.com/ -- A new study of 6,838 written one- and two-star Google reviews of 294 high-review-count moving companies finds that how the company is run was the model-classified main reason in 65.0 percent of the 6,837 reviews the main-reason pass labelled. The model classified the physical move itself as the main reason in 34.1 percent of the labelled reviews, and 0.9 percent were unclear.

The study was published by Sales Roadmap (salesroadmaps.com) and conducted by Kamyar Shah, a fractional COO and founder of World Consulting Group. It covers moving companies in Phoenix, Dallas, Atlanta, Charlotte, Columbus, Denver, Tampa and Kansas City. The reviews are the written one- and two-star reviews of at least five words among the up-to-60 lowest-rated reviews retrieved per business, with review dates from 2009-08-19 to 2026-09-30.

The damage to belongings label was the most common model-assigned theme. The model assigned the damage to belongings label to 46.9 percent of the 6,838 reviews, work pace and quality to 45.1 percent, communication failure to 43.7 percent and price and estimate to 41.6 percent. These are themes a model assigned to what reviewers wrote, not verified events, and the shares overlap. The model assigned at least one core-service label, covering the move itself, to 69.6 percent of the 6,838 reviews.

Claims handling also appears in damage and loss reviews. A total of 3,687 reviews, 53.9 percent of the 6,838, report damage to belongings or lost or missing items. Of those 3,687, 51.5 percent also cite claims handling. The study did not read any moving contract and makes no finding about valuation terms or what any company owed.

One reviewer wrote: "The total cost ended up being almost double the estimate". Another wrote: "They no longer return my phone calls or emails either."

"A moving company owner can read these reviews as a list of moments to check in their own records," said Kamyar Shah. "The estimate, the arrival time and the damage report are all named in them."

The number that keeps this honest. The 309 moving companies sampled hold 212,753 lifetime Google reviews between them. Of those, 11,137, or 5.2 percent, are one or two stars, and 92.3 percent are five stars. Of the 309, 294 have at least one review in the corpus. The study describes what the sampled written one- and two-star reviews in the corpus say. None of its figures is a share of customers.

How the study was done. Reviews were retrieved through the DataForSEO business data API. In each metro, up to 200 listings were screened and, after filters including a cap of two locations per brand, the 40 businesses with the most Google reviews were sampled. Eleven businesses were excluded after their names were read, including junk-removal firms and portable-storage container rentals. A language model, Claude Haiku 4.5, classified the main reason, and a second model, Claude Sonnet 4.5, classified 200 of the same reviews. On the binary question of how the business is run against every other main reason, the two agreed on 85.5 percent, with a Cohen's kappa of 0.678 (95 percent confidence interval 0.56 to 0.78). No sample was checked against human coding. The study did not check any estimate, invoice or claim.

"The study counts what reviewers wrote and how a model labelled it," Shah said. "It does not judge whether any company or any reviewer was right."

The full study, including every theme, the method and its limitations, is available at https://salesroadmaps.com/moving-company-negative-reviews-study/

ABOUT Kamyar Shah is a Fractional COO, Fractional CMO, and Executive Coach, and the founder of World Consulting Group, with over 25 years of experience helping organizations achieve operational excellence and sustainable growth. He has led 650+ consulting engagements producing more than $300M in measurable results. More at https://kamyarshah.com and https://www.worldconsultinggroup.com

CONTACT Kamyar Shah World Consulting Group https://kamyarshah.com/contact/

KEYWORDS moving company, online reviews, negative reviews, moving company operations, moving damage claims, fractional COO, Google reviews, Kamyar Shah

kamyar Shah
World Consulting Group
+18135201687 ext.
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