Looking for Ideas to Increase Dealership Online Reviews

[DjSec]

I’m working on designing a review funnel system for a dealership, and would love any feedback on the idea.

Here’s the problem:

The Dealership has a lot of 5 star reviews but none of them are recent because customers just don’t normally leave reviews.

Here’s the rough outline of my idea:

1.) Send a follow-up email 24 hours after a visit, then a reminder 3 days later if no review.
2.) Give customers the choice to review on Google, Facebook, Yelp, etc.
3.) Everyone lands on the dealership’s own review page. This captures 1–5 stars internally.

• 1–4 Encourage private feedback (and escalate to a manager).
• 5 Encourage public reviews (Google, Facebook, etc.).
  Incentives A raffle or general thank you gift for any review (positive or negative), staying compliant with Google/Yelp rules.
  Dashboard Internal system to track, filter, and respond to reviews.

My Question:

• What’s worked (or failed) at your dealership when it comes to collecting reviews?
• How do you balance Google’s compliance rules with the need to boost reviews?
• Would you find value in an internal dashboard that filters low-star feedback before it goes public?

I’m building this with Django + Celery to handle the automation side, but I’m more interested in what features would actually help dealerships get more (and better) reviews.

 

[DecisionLinks]

This isn't a sexy answer, but at my last dealership we simply had our sales team ask a client if they would leave them a review on Google. Obviously this has to be framed a certain way for it to work. 1st and most critical, ONLY ask clients that are happy and have good report with the salesmen. We'd have them ask right before they went back to finance. 2nd Have salesmen present it as a "Every good review I get , my manager gives me a $__ bonus", people WANT to help if they're happy.

This worked for us and got us a good 5 to 10 reviews a week in the busy season.

 

[DjSec]

This isn't a sexy answer, but at my last dealership we simply had our sales team ask a client if they would leave them a review on Google. Obviously this has to be framed a certain way for it to work. 1st and most critical, ONLY ask clients that are happy and have good report with the salesmen. We'd have them ask right before they went back to finance. 2nd Have salesmen present it as a "Every good review I get , my manager gives me a $__ bonus", people WANT to help if they're happy.

This worked for us and got us a good 5 to 10 reviews a week in the busy season.

Thanks I guess it is best to try and hit them at the peak of their customer satisfaction!

And it would be cool if there was a way to hit them up with a custom video of some sort once they leave the dealership and we need to make sure the app is designed to make it easy for Google and AI to spider and rank.

 

[DecisionLinks]

Thanks I guess it is best to try and hit them at the peak of their customer satisfaction!

And it would be cool if there was a way to hit them up with a custom video of some sort once they leave the dealership and we need to make sure the app is designed to make it easy for Google and AI to spider and rank.

Not a bad idea, We'd always have a 2 week follow up call for all sales. It also allowed the salesmen to ask once more for the review if the call was going well.