GM Reputation Management "Required"

[Jeff Kershner]

Throwing more fuel to the fire - did anyone see the article Automotive News published today?

Automotive News speaks Greg Mays of Greg Mays Chevy in Texas. A few quotes from the article but follow the link below to read more…


Enough mandates, already!
IT micromanaging is unnecessary, costly, Texas GM dealer says

Texas Chevrolet dealer Greg May says he could do without the latest mandate from General Motors to hire a firm to handle his online reputation management.

Like all GM dealerships, Greg May Chevrolet of West, Texas, near Waco, had to select by last week one of three vendors approved by GM.

GM issued the mandate to ensure that all its dealerships solicit customer reviews, post them on the right consumer sites and respond promptly to negative reviews that can hurt both the vehicle brand and the dealership.

Failure to comply puts at risk 20 percent of what GM's four brands pay quarterly in dealer Standards for Excellence bonuses pegged to vehicle sales, consumer satisfaction and other measures.

"Chevrolet is the only one of my franchises that tells me who I have to do business with," said May, who also is dealer principal of Honda and Nissan stores in Texas.


Read more: http://www.autonews.com/article/20130121/RETAIL07/301219952#ixzz2IrF56VBj

 

[DrewAment]

GM said in its statement that the "vast majority" of its dealers use Cobalt Web sites as their primary Web site and have a "high level of satisfaction" with the product.

While a "majority" is probably true, as the cost makes sense for a smaller dealer, last time I ran a check on the top 50 Chevy dealers in the US... less than 30 percent used a Cobalt site as a main website. And, ALL the top 10 used a non-Cobalt site as their main site. So if the Chevy dealers that are actually selling cars are not using the "mandated" GM endorsed site... what does that say?

I do understand that GM wants a limited amount of control over the look and feel of the dealers sites. But, doesn't that stifle growth and innovation? Doesn't that make Dealer A, look just like Dealer B?? And in a major metro market this is actually a hindrance to the dealer trying to make themselves look different - giving the customer a reason on why the dealer is different and should do business with them. That said - let the dealers (independent businesses) do what they want, with the vendors of their choice - with certain design aspects being mandated.

A little perspective - I wonder what would have happened if all the dealers had to have the same looking print ad 15 years ago?

 

[ryan.leslie]

Straight talk: This mandate has nothing to do with helping dealers build and promote their own reputation in a meaningful way. It has everything to do with dragging up the dealers that are damaging GM's reputation by failing to protect and promote their own. There are two names on the side of every building and GM has a strong case for doing this. That said, I echo Greg May:
"May said GM's intentions are good but the execution is ham-handed."

For those of you like me that aren't as smart as the author or the Dealer Principal featured in this article:

Definition of HAM-HANDED
: lacking dexterity or grace : heavy-handed

Drew makes an excellent point here, overwhelming sameness of the retailer is likely to be underwhelming to the consumer. Good for the OEM, not so good for the dealer. There clearly could have been some exceptions for dealers that were already successful in this area, many of whom are active readers and posters here on DealerRefresh.

As far as SFE is concerned, I'd strongly caution dealers from "mailing it in" and abdicating the responsibility of preserving and promoting your reputation to any vendor, OEM endorsement or not. If GM mandates that you use them, use them to augment your own efforts to engage your prospective customers in a meaningful way, but YOU must be involved.

I'm extremely concerned about the long-term effectiveness of pre-screening survey respondents and only inviting positive responders to post on 3rd party sites AFTER a positive review has been published on a Cobalt site's "testimonials page." This may be great for your Cobalt site's SEO, but let's be honest that may not be the best thing for dealers that have invested in a primary site for more control over user experience. My bigger concern is that Google will see the same referring domain attempting to dump positive review after positive review into a dealer's G+ page. I think they'll define this as solicitation at best, and their TOU is clear about that.

Last thoughts:
​

1. 
   [*=left]A "testimonial page" on your own website is advertising, it is not the same as a vetted 3rd party review to the consumer. (There has been lots of discussion about this on DealerRefresh already. I think we settled that discussion 18 months ago.) It will be even less effective if it looks exactly the same as every other competing dealer for your brand. Expect consumers to reject that content as advertising and seek out 3rd party sites.
   [*=left]Concentrating on "first to publish for seo" instead of "first importance to the consumer" demonstrates a misunderstanding of WHY reviews and reputation work.

 

[BHavican]

"Doesn't that make Dealer A, look just like Dealer B?"

It's not just the sites that they want to control but the physical dealerships too. We just went through a remodel and I'm not going to lie, it's nice, but I was blown away when I heard about how every little detail had to be GM approved and how much the stuff on their lists cost.

With the reputation management the frustrating part about that so far has been the waiting. The company we chose wasn't prepared for the flood of customers and so we're stuck paying for a service we're not getting yet and might not get til mid Feb.

I can understand where GM is coming from with all of it, but it seems a little overboard. It's like the video that was posted a few days ago about not punishing everyone for a few people's mistakes.

 

[Eley Duke]

Its been a few months now and I am curious to hear from Chevy dealers doing the required reputation management by Chevrolet. Can you all answer 3 questions.

1. Which Company did you choose? Can you grade them A,B,C,D,F

2. What is your overall opinion on the integration and how its working?

3. Has it made a difference?

add anything you care to, please share all you can for everyone to benefit.

Thanks, Eley

 

[VVAuto1]

We choose cobalt so all text would be on the page rather than I frame in.

Results as follows -

spitzerlordstown.com - 89 reviews on website, 0 google reviews
spitzerchevyeast.com 51 reviews reviews on website, 1 google rereviewing

i have 2 other chevy sites and we've seen the same. They do a great job getting reviews for our website bad job for google.

anyone have experience with the other vendors? Does my logic make sense for Seo?

 

[Daringo]

We've been using the GM mandated RepMan service for about 4 months now. We choose the Cobalt version. In a nutshell, expect about a 50:1 ratio of website reviews to 3rd Party reviews. In fact, I even called Cobalt about this low conversion and they said "Yep, that's about right, we're seeing about 50:1". Now, we use a different RepMan service for our other brands and that yields close to a 4:1 ratio of review requests to 3rd Party reviews. We can even fine tune the request based on the customer's email (i.e. ask for a Google Places review when a @gmail is noticed).

Needless to say, since we KNOW there are better solutions out there, it stinks to be forced to use an inferior product.

Good luck.

 

[VVAuto1]

Who are you using and what is conversion of google reviews? Sounds like a good product...

 

[Daringo]

Who are you using and what is conversion of google reviews? Sounds like a good product...

I'd rather not disclose that in this forum sorry. But I can tell you Google and Yelp reviews are very difficult to get for a few reasons. Both require you to register as a user first. Google requires that you use a real name in your review. Yelp most likely will filter first time reviews - especially if they are 1 or 5 star. So things work best if you know in advance if a customer is a "Yelper" or has a gmail account or yahoo account. Even so, those conversion ratios are about 10:1 (requests:reviews). And that is why we almost always include a DealerRater option for customers to leave a review: The link takes you directly to the review form. We like Edmunds for this reason too.

A few more observations: Sales customers are much more willing to write a review than service customers. Reviews are more likely to occur if you give the customer a heads up that a review request email is coming. And sending it as soon as possible after the sale seems to help.

Good luck everyone. If I find a way to opt-out of the GM RepMan program without jeopardizing SFE Money, I'll let you know how it was done. Somebody has to be bright enough to see we are being forced to use a service that is not very effective and pull the plug on this thing!

Reminds me of the... "Hey, we're putting all your inventory on eBay" experiment GM tried a year or so ago.

D

 

[CoryHosch]

We signed up two dealerships and choose Digital Air Strike for our Buick GMC Cadillac location and Cobalt for our Chevrolet location. Between those two I would give the edge to Digital Air Strike. That BGC dealership does not have the same amount of sales and service opportunities so it is tough to compare them head to head for review counts and survey replies. The integration process was a little smoother with Digital Air Strike and they are easier to work with. For example we requested the script for the review widget so we could insert that on other websites and Cobalt refuses to do that. We are considering switching our Chevy dealership over to DAS or Naked Lime but our LMA pays for it through Cobalt so we are going to stick it out a little longer and see how everything works out.
For example we are trying to set up different contact points for warranty pay vs. customer pay for closed service R.O's and want to make sure the GM Survey does not get lost in all of this activity. GM will not allow that dates of when these are sent though. We want our customers looking for the GM survey and do not want them to think that these short rep management surveys are what they should be looking for. Little things like that are giving this negative feedback and disappointment. Other restrictions come from being forced to put the poor reviews with the good. I understand that poor reviews are an opportunity to stand out and I feel that a negative review is needed every now and again on review sites to keep things honest. On our actual website though I feel we should be able to make that decision. We spend a lot of time, energy and money to get traffic to our websites so that is the last past we want to highlight a negative customer experience and drive the new customer away from OUR website after we finally got them there. A customer visiting an exact dealership website will understand that the business is only going to want to highlight positive interactions and is using to help promote business. If I were shopping for some type of big ticket item, I would not expect to visit a website for an ATV or boat dealership for example, and find negative reviews on that dealerships own website. That is not a good selling point and I would question why that business did that before I appreciated them for their honesty.