This one caught my eye this morning, SHOCKER right?
I am adamantly opposed to sales pitches in a forum, especially this forum. I know that the dealership personnel that hang out at DealerRefresh see through it anyway. I refer everybody I talk to to this forum and it's not because I think they need another pitch. If you want a pitch, call me, I'll be happy to oblige
Two quick thoughts on this that come from working with a ton of dealers, some doing it well, some with a lot of room to improve.
1. Process: Process drives success. I can tell you firsthand that Kevin has been massively successful building reviews and his post is a great one. Automated process like he is suggesting is that much better. I don't recommend "set it and forget it" because you'll be reminded of it when it starts breaking. Automated process needs to be periodically monitored and tuned as Kevin already said.
2. Incentive: Jill, I think your statement was tongue in cheek, but I want to point out something.
Leveraging Reviews is a strategy! It takes some work to build and leverage reviews, but the individual payoff for the sales people and service writers can be huge. You don't need to spiff them, you need to show them how a ton of reviews with their name on them builds their personal business as well as the dealers.
Try this, put on your customer hat and Google "Acton Toyota." You don't even need to click into the places page because there is a link to DealerRater citing the review from the SERP. A customer that is driven by a high service expectation is calling "Steve Jensen" because there are a huge number of positive reviews that reference him. How many incoming calls does Steve need to take before he is actively requesting reviews from his customers? I'm going to guess not many. Pavlov had it right. Reward drives behavior.
I didn't want this post to read like a pitch, but there are a lot of other ways for individual reps and writers to leverage reviews. I tried to show one that wasn't specific to any product or service that we offer. Feel free to PM me if you want more info.
Ryan