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Getting Online Reviews

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ajholland

ajholland

Boss
Nov 29, 2009
172
12
First Name
Aaron
#1
We are trying very hard to find a system to start getting our customers to write reviews on Google or Dealerrater, but we haven't found a system that works. Simply telling our Consultants to ask their happy customer to do it has failed.

If any of you have had great success in building reviews, could you share your process?

Thanks!
 
#2
The first rule about sales people is they do not do anything without monetary benefit. Or food.

You bribe them. I started with baked goods to get us going, and now we do monthly drawings for something - gift card, TV...etc. I hope your dealer recognizes the importance of reviews and will offer you a couple hundred bucks to work with every month!
 
#3
Let me share what we did at first that did not work, and then share what did... In the beginning, we encouraged our sales reps and managers to ask customers who bought a car to please write a review for us - little to no response. We then built an email template that would be sent out by our CRM tool automatically after a car was marked sold, but our managers were adamant that we could not automate the process, as this would encourage negative feedback. They protested that they should be able to manually send the reviews email template to customers that they knew were highly satisfied. Of course, they rarely sent the template out as they were more worried about other things...

When we finally automated the ratings email template to be sent to all sold customers and customers with closed service RO's, THEN the reviews started coming in consistently. You need to make it as simple as possible, with direct links to the ratings pages at each site where you are trying to build up feedback, and then manage the template each month to change the sites to mix up your locations for feedback. This has worked incredibly well for us, and our tremendous amount of positive feedback has been the reward...
 
#4
The best strategy that I have seen so far is to have a customer do a review while they are waiting to go back into F&I. Usually at this point they are excited to be buying the car and will gladly do this, especially having time to kill.
 
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#5
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
 
#6
@Justin,

Posted right on top of you and didn't see your comments before mine went up. Just to be real clear, I was not taking a cheap shot at you. I was referencing a previous thread that was pretty clearly nothing but a product pitch complete with costs and a registration link.

No hard feelings I hope.
 
#7
Ryan Leslie said:
@Justin,

Posted right on top of you and didn't see your comments before mine went up. Just to be real clear, I was not taking a cheap shot at you. I was referencing a previous thread that was pretty clearly nothing but a product pitch complete with costs and a registration link.

No hard feelings I hope.
Click to expand...

Once my eyes dried up, I decided to forgive you.

No worries at all :lmao:
 
#8
OK, No need to Google us....I'm here to give you a little bit of our playbook.....

@Ryan, Thanks and yes all the ideas you have were correct.....kinda
@Justin, You can't have customers write reviews at your store or you will get blackballed on any reputable sites by having too many reviews show up from 1 location.
@Kevin, having an automated request or a managed request that is easy for customers to get to the correct screen at a review site is key.


Yes, we have asked for, contested for, built salesperson pages etc...all of these items when used CONSISTENTLY work. We also read positive stories and surveys in sales meetings instead of pounding salespeople for not filling in the mileage on P&S' or other trivia that managers like to torture salespeople with at their meetings.

The real secret sauce that everyone avoids talking about is providing review worthy customer experiences.This is the part that separates the true customer centric stores, when you really do the right thing by your customer's standards they want to share their experience and you just provide them with how.
 
#10
I have done a few things to get our reviews up and running in a short time.

1. I reviewed every positive survey we received back over the last 6 months and sent an email to every one of those customers saying that if they provide a review, we will give them a free oil change. I did not ask for a good review, but I did only send it to satisfied customers. This worked well to get us jump started.

2. On DealerRater you can make a separate page for each sales person, manager, etc to show their reviews. I also have an email go to every single sales person and manager when a review comes in. It has become a competition among a good amount of sales people. Everyone likes recognition, so it feels good when a customer submits a positive review and it goes to everyone in the dealership. I also actively hand out the rate us cards to customers who are obviously very happy.

That is about it. I don't spend a ton of time of getting hundred of reviews, but so far so good.
 
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