Debate: Are customers still intimidated at the Dealership?

[Alex Snyder]

The trend seems to be going more toward using online reviews as tools. WideWail, for example, places SEO language into review responses. Later this afternoon @Jeff Kershner and I are chatting with Podium to hear more about what they're doing. I look forward to having something cool to share on their behalf in the near future.

In full disclosure, I bring both of these companies up because they are sponsors of DealerRefresh. When it comes to reputation management these two companies are doing quite a bit to push the needle in this area. They're worth keeping an eye on.

@joe.chura is taking some bigger steps with DealerRater. I'd keep an eye on them too.

 

[ryan.leslie]

Exactly my point. If it's pay to play within their model (and it is, been deep in that puddle), how does that effect change? Like you have wisely (IMO) said, "When every dealer or salesperson has a 4.9 and hundreds of reviews, what the differentiator?" I'll disagree with the part on extortion, it's always been soft extortion. Pay us or you're f*cked with negatives.

@Alexander Lau, we have a long, boring history debating this topic on now defunct forums. The title of this thread is ironic, right? That was fun, but I'm happy to leave it behind. No offense intended, but I can assure you that you weren't as "deep in that puddle" as you think, and you certainly weren't as deep as @Heather MacKinnon.

On the puddle scale of the early days of online reviews, Heather was swimming the Pacific. Shoot man, on that scale she was Genesis 1:9

 

[Alexander Lau]

@Alexander Lau, we have a long, boring history debating this topic on now defunct forums. The title of this thread is ironic, right? That was fun, but I'm happy to leave it behind. No offense intended, but I can assure you that you weren't as "deep in that puddle" as you think, and you certainly weren't as deep as @Heather MacKinnon.

On the puddle scale of the early days of online reviews, Heather was swimming the Pacific. Shoot man, on that scale she was Genesis 1:9

We do, you're right . I'll never change my position on it. I don't know anything about Heather and good for her if she were (I complimented her above). At zenith, I believe I reputation managed close to 75 rooftops (and that included DealerRater negatives), so yeah in the grand scheme of things nowhere near the amount of tops out there. It's nice of you to go to bat for your colleague at CS though .

The one thing that I do remember (and maybe this has changed), it was a huge pain in the ass to get the dealer to act on negative reviews (ownership, protocol, etc.) and in some instances, even more so to get them to pay DR in order to remove the negatives, even though most of the time they were warranted.

These days, I go to bat for https://women-drivers.com.
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