Getting Online Reviews

[Craig]

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.

Clay,
I would be hesitant to recommend this as a review gathering technique......sure you didn't require the review to be good to receive an oil change, however the perception of the people you "pay" for reviews is that everyone gets paid for reviews. This makes these same customers give your reviews no thought when purchasing their next vehicle or service or referring friends or family.

Just my opinion, but I think spending the extra time instead of paying customers is the way to go. Spiff your salespeople or service writers based on the most reviews for a set time span and you will get the same results without watering down the effect of your reviews.

 

[futureship]

About a year ago I created a customer survey that asked my SOLD customers to rate their experience. Of course I chose fairly-leading questions & answers from drop downs. Coded in .php I integrated it into the track workflow of my CRM for CRMSold customers. The forms were submitted directly from each customer's inbox & posted directly to a blog which fed to a content box on the main website and to various locations which were optimized for SEs to p/u. Don't rely on sales or mgrs to ask for reviews...asking for referrals is difficult enough.

The key...create a call-to-action/incentive for each customer to submit a survey (pending your approval prior to it being posted of course.) It is imperative to create a consistent flow of reviews that not only improve/maintain the rep of your business, but help the SEO of your site & content as well.

 

[MullerToyota]

Clay,
I would be hesitant to recommend this as a review gathering technique......sure you didn't require the review to be good to receive an oil change, however the perception of the people you "pay" for reviews is that everyone gets paid for reviews. This makes these same customers give your reviews no thought when purchasing their next vehicle or service or referring friends or family.

Just my opinion, but I think spending the extra time instead of paying customers is the way to go. Spiff your salespeople or service writers based on the most reviews for a set time span and you will get the same results without watering down the effect of your reviews.

Craig,

That is a good point and something I did not think about. The initial goal was to use that incentive to get some reviews on the board. After reading your post, I doubt I will continue with that method.

I do like the idea of spiffing the sales people and service writers. I feel that service is a huge area where we can make this excel.

 

[Matt DoCampo]

I would recommend having the Finance person ask for the review and place the DealerRater postcard in with the customer's copies of the paperwork. It was easier for us to get 1 or 2 F&I people to buy into the online review program because they had enough sales experience to understand the value of referral business and enough management experience to understand the importance of online reputation management.

All of the managers in our store receive a notification of a new review. Unintentionally, each manager would forward the positive review to the sales person with an 'atta boy.' I believe the positive recognition led to increased buy in from the sales people.

We continue to have the F&I person bring up the subject of the review but the sales people are following up on their own now to make sure it gets done.

 

[Craig]

I would recommend having the Finance person ask for the review and place the DealerRater postcard in with the customer's copies of the paperwork. It was easier for us to get 1 or 2 F&I people to buy into the online review program because they had enough sales experience to understand the value of referral business and enough management experience to understand the importance of online reputation management.

All of the managers in our store receive a notification of a new review. Unintentionally, each manager would forward the positive review to the sales person with an 'atta boy.' I believe the positive recognition led to increased buy in from the sales people.

We continue to have the F&I person bring up the subject of the review but the sales people are following up on their own now to make sure it gets done.

I can't wait to print this to show our F&I department this post, they are going to be stoked

Absolutely agree that letting salespeople know you read their reviews and helping them create/build their own Digital Footprint while growing the Dealership's presence is a worthy project to have.

 

[Marc McGurren]

Hello all! I just wanted to let everyone know how we are doing with our reviews. We have had more reviews come in the past 30 days than we have in any given period before. Why? A couple of reasons.

I had our CRM to previously flag a salesperson to send the customer a template asking for a review. Basically they weren't being forced to send the email asking for the review. Why they wouldn't want to - I have no idea...but they weren't consistently sending them out.

I now have it setup for 3 days after a sale that an email goes out asking for the review for every sold customer. It comes from the salesperson and clearly spells it out. I actually took a little from Jerry's previous email template he recommended.

I think this has been the biggest difference - reading ALL reviews for the previous week in front of the entire sales staff on our Saturday morning meeting. We have over 70 salespeople in our main location - so quite a few people get to hear how their customers feel about them.

I think the salespeople are finally "getting it" and therefore more engaged. This is a never ending process and you must always keep the awareness up...if not...the urgency goes away.

All that to say - I am all for sending an email to every sold customer asking for a review.

What would be killer is for a process to be triggered in my CRM to tell if the customer has or has not written a review. This will most likely have to be a manual task - but just will take some time to set it all up - but would be VERY cool to follow up with the people that have left reviews differently than those that have not.

PS - As I typed this we got 2 reviews in! Very cool.

 

[Jerry Thibeau]

It comes from the salesperson and clearly spells it out. I actually took a little from Jerry's previous email template he recommended.

Glad to hear you're having awesome success.

Where do I send the bill? Don't forget to mix up the review sites based on what's popular in your area.

 

[Jeff Kershner]

Right on Marc! I hate to say this but anytime you get the opportunity to bypass people and automate a process such as this, it needs to be done in order to achieve great results.

There is only 1 reason why my Toyota dealer has over 300 reviews and counting on dealerrater...I bypassed people and automated the process to ask for reviews.

I did something interesting just to prove a point...

I trained the whole dealer body on dealer ratings and how to leverage. I reviewed our process for obtaining more reviews with sales and service staff. I built out templates and individual DealerRater pages for each adviser. I ordered extra DealerRater cards so the advisers had some material to hand out to their customers.

To get reviews and buy-in jumpstarted, we ran a dealer wide contest (I personally hate running contest and paying people to do their job). A nice bonus check to the sales and service adviser that obtained the most reviews in 1 month.

Even with the bonus, the reviews were minimal. It gave us a little jumpstart but not long after the contest, we went were back to little to no reviews. And this was after another additional training and the implementation of a monthly "DealerRater Report Card" that I put together.

Phase two, bypass the service advisers and automate the service review request. We use AutoRevenue for much of our service marketing so I set up an automated after service email asking each and every customer to review their experience. This is when the review flood gate opens.

WARNING: when you automate the process asking for customer reviews you better be willing to accept the good with the bad. You WILL get bad reviews, especially if your service department is not on the same page and doesn't truly provide a good experience.

I say do it anyways - if your going to be transparent then go all the way. Just be sure the GM and Owner understand the true importance of transparency and customer reviews. When you take this approach and you have upper management on-board, it quickly brings real accountability to the service team. The department where it matters most!

I have yet to bring my sales team over to the automated process. This will be going live next week. I'm done waiting around for them to react and see the importance. Not saying I won't continue to push the message with ongoing training and our DealerRater Report Card.

Customer testimonials are much more than just a review. And dealers going after ONLY the good reviews - that's LAME! Get your shit together and ask each and every customer to review. I challenge you to automate your process.

Everyone touches on the marketing and self promotional value in the dealer ratings but most are blind to the real profound shift in culture that comes about when adopting true transparency across your business/dealership. The payoff is priceless.

 

[Brian Pasch]

One of the challenges with getting reviews on Google Places is that they have to create a Google account. Two thoughts here. One, search your CRM system to find customers that have a gmail account and you can send them a special email template that acknowledges that they have a Google account and its will be easy to post a review.

Secondly, in the service or F&I process, you should be asking customers if they have a Gmail account and if they do, hand them a wireless iPad and have them post a review on Google Places. Google accounts that are already created should not represent any in-house fraud since no new accounts are being created in the store.

 

[Jerry Thibeau]

WARNING: when you automate the process asking for customer reviews you better be willing to accept the good with the bad. You WILL get bad reviews, especially if your service department is not on the same page and doesn't truly provide a good experience.

I view this as a positive since it allows you to now fix a process that is broken and provide your customers with even better service.