Google places reviews

[SlickRick]

Hey guys,

I have been reading about on-site reviews for a while and decided to do reviews with customers once a day. Real customers that are happy with the service they are getting at my store right before the delivery of the car.

I opened my google places account and I just bought an iPad for the dealership. The problem I have right now is:

- It is not possible to right reviews on the desktop version of the google reviews site.

- Each person needs to create a google account to write a review.

Is there a better way to do this ? Can we write all the reviews with one account ?

How is this done at your dealership?

- Rick

 

[ryan.leslie]

Hey Rick,

The question you should be asking is why am I asking for reviews in the first place? Let the answer to that question motivate your process. Is it just marketing, or are there other reasons I am asking for this from my customers?

Contrary to what some big name consultants are currently preaching, with the exception of maybe video testimonials, I don't think that the risk reward equation of in-store collection balances. You are one retroactive change by Google on IP filtering from losing every review, and you really need to consider the potential impact on the consumer.

Case in point:
Have you considered what it is going to look like to the unsold prospect you are courting if you write multiple reviews from the same account? As a consumer, it would look like your business was trying to pull a fast one on me and I'm ruling you out. The easy things have far less value.

I'm not sure who you were reading that encouraged you to head down this path, but there are so many reasons NOT to do in-store collection, I'd ask you to reconsider. I think you'll find better quality reviews and a lot of ancillary benefits to NOT allowing reviews to be written in the store.

Did you see this thread? I'd start here...
http://forum.dealerrefresh.com/f43/mike-blumenthal-onsite-review-stations-google-2253.html

 

[AJHamblin]

I don't think you have justified any reason to not request customer reviews at the store. I don't see any reason why you shouldn't take full of advantage with a satisfied customer that's at your store to ask them to share their experience. Although, I don't believe you should do so before delivery, because of time restraint (rushed delivery/take too long to get car... and it's a little premature) Delivery is the key customer satisfaction step of the sale. Its the happy stage of the process - they got their new car (opportunity to forget most discomforts of purchasing even aggressive negotiating)
There are many ways to approach satisfied customer's at the end of the delivery process and put the words in their mouth that you want to see on your review page. If you take care of your customer - they are happy to share their experience (you ask for referrals don't you?) I think its even a less tacky way to reinforce the sharing of the positive experience then a call to request referrals and it actually lays the stage for a referral request.

 

[Jeff Kershner]

Not this conversation again? Good grief. It's all you Ryan. Just copy and paste from the other thread on our agreed position on obtaining reviews at the dealership.

 

[ryan.leslie]

Not this conversation again? Good grief. It's all you Ryan. Just copy and paste from the other thread on our agreed position on obtaining reviews at the dealership.

Guess I should have done that to begin with Jeff.

AJ, I was really not trying to build a case for not collecting in the store in my post. I really wanted Rick and anyone else considering this to look at the thread I linked to and hear from other dealers and industry folks that it's a bad idea. You don't have to take my word for it, Jeff, Ed and Joe put this to bed already. Jeff's comments from the thread are below, but you owe it to yourself to read Ed and Joe's comments too, then if you disagree I'll be happy to try to dig deeper with you. Let me ask you this though since we agree that asking a customer to go to a review station before delivery is "premature." In the customer's mind, when is the transaction complete? Is there a perceivable difference for the consumer that buys a car every 3-4 years between "before delivery" and "before the tires cross the curb?"

Here are Jeff's thoughts:

I'm completely opposed to having consumers reviewing their experience while at the dealership. It's defeats the REAL purpose of reviews and as far as I'm concerned - completely discredits review sites all together.

"Google’s policy is clearly contrary to the industry norms" IMO this might be due to having difficulties in getting consumers to rate their experience on Google places.

"Firstly it seems coercive. If a customer is in your store, they can’t very easily say no and more importantly, they might not feel free to leave a fully honest or negative review." PLUS let's be real - how much time is a consumer really going to take to rate their experience at the dealership while standing there at the review station. The quality of these reviews I bet would suffer. The best part of customer reviews (good and bad) is getting honest feedback so you truly know where you're doing great and where you might need to place some additional focus for better customer service.

Not to turn this into a DealerRater thread but IF you can get past using reviews for nothing more that a Marketing ploy, you would have a better understanding and appreciation on how you can use the service to better your dealership all together.

 

[SlickRick]

Everyone has some excellent points in this discussion. I would like to note that my dealership has been open since 2003 and I have 0 reviews on yelp or google reviews. The dealer I am currently at is a volume dealership (7,300 units/year) and all the reviews online date from 2007 and they are ALL on discussion forums. I believe if I had the reviews for my company right under the website (with the number of stars and the ability to see the reviews) then I believe it would reassure a lot of my customers. It is just not very accessible for people to see reviews about my dealership. I am not going to “falsify” reviews or anything like that.

A dealer that creates accounts for the consumer themselves:
Off Lease Only

I am not saying its wrong but just look at the name of the users and when you click on them they ALL have 1 review.

What kind of pitch would work to ask for customers to write a review about you ?

- Rick

 

[ryan.leslie]

Rick,

Which one of these looks credible to you?





Now here we go, see any similarities here between Places, SuperPages and InsiderPages? I linked out to the pages because I can't capture all of it. ZMOT tells us that customers use a lot of sites pre-purchase, I can't imagine a customer believing ANYTHING you say when they find verbatim content under different usernames on multiple properties. Embarassing.

Just my 2 cents of course, but you think TrueCar has the industry stirred up? Wait until the news media latches on to Review gaming. They won't go after the small mom and pop hardware store, they will zero in on their favorite industry to demonize, and they won't have any trouble finding things to report on... Rick, please don't look at this store as one to emulate, this is a good example of what NOT to do.


Off Lease Only


Off Lease Only in Palm Springs, FL | 3531 Lake Worth Rd, Palm Springs, FL


Off Lease Only - Lake Worth

 

[Jeff Kershner]

Shameful. Stupid dealers. Idiots. And so obvious about it. Need I say more?

 

[Nyagoslav]

I'd like to make a little point here. I would not repeat what Ryan already said about in-store reviews (review station, or whatever you call them), but I want to stress on getting reviews from customers that are not active users of Google Places. This is potentially dangerous for the long existence of these reviews as Google has (or at least is trying to have) an anti-spam system similar to the one of Yelp, where reviews from users with 1-2 interactions are most of the times filtered out. Ryan already mentioned the IP address problem.

To get good volume of quality reviews that would stick, you would have to make it easy for the customers to write them and you will have to make it the right way. One good starting point would be if you have their email addresses and if they use Yahoo! Mail, they could easily post a review on your Yahoo! Local listing. If they use a Gmail it would not be a problem to create a profile for Google Places too. However, the bottom line is that you have to offer them more than 1 option, so that they could leave the testimonial wherever they find it the most comfortable to.

On a side note, you can always use rich snippets and mark up the collected testimonials on the company's website. If done correctly, this could potentially increase the CTR to the website tremendously.

Cheers,
Nyagoslav