Automotive Dealership Internet Reputation Management and Online Reviews

There has been a lot written lately about Internet Reputation Management (IRM). For automotive dealerships and other businesses that rely on their reputation, IRM boils down to one phrase:  Get your customers to leave your business positive reviews.  Yes, SEO does a great job of getting most bad press and links to review sites off your first page of search results.  But the negative reviews and info are still our there and easy to find.  But what about Google Places?  Google searches the Internet for reviews about your business, aggregates them all and displays your average “star” rating (1-5, where 5 stars is the best) right at the top of your Google search results.  If you’re a 4.5 star or above dealership, then you’re doing fine, however this is less a few percent of all dealers in the US.

Your customers are already talking about you online.  The number of sites that allow users to review businesses seems to be growing daily.  I won’t bore you with statistics but negative reviews hurt your business. Every day, more and more people are using customer reviews to decide who they do business with.  You can no longer afford to ignore what people are saying about your business online.

The challenge is how you do you manage what is said about you and your business online?  The first step is to see what’s currently out there.  When you Google your business name, what shows up?  Is it all hate and venom?  Any good reviews around?  Your percentage should be between 90-95% positive.  Is this what you are seeing? If not, you need to get to work.

Here are some tips from the team at iMotive Consulting for improving and managing your Internet Reputation.

• Don’t employ ethically challenged personnel. Negative online reviews can cause a great deal of harm to Automotive Dealerships. This is because of the public’s already universal acceptance of negative dealership stereotypes. Employees that engage in unethical behavior reinforce these stereotypes and are often named directly in bad reviews. Removing or correcting the behavior of an unethical employee will help cut down on the number of negative reviews your business receives.

• You can’t fake it. All major review sites use sophisticated IP address recognition and tracking software. Users that leave multiple reviews from the same IP Address (A unique identifier given to individual computers and networks) will be immediately recognized and all associated reviews will be removed. Even worse is the possibility that a dealership can be publicly identified as posting faking reviews. This is a PR nightmare that the media loves to run with. Do not fake reviews. Your reviews must come directly from your customers.  It is fine to ask for reviews, but they must always be written by your customers and away from your dealership.  Be careful of any service that states they leave the review on the behalf of the customer.  It’s fine to ask your customers to leave reviews but you can’t do the typing for them.  Take a look at this example of a dealer who recently found themselves in hot water over too many “perfect” reviews.

• Don’t buy reviews. Don’t offer free services like oil changes or tire rotations in exchange for a review or testimonial. If you do compensate your customers for reviews, you must disclose that the writer of the review has been compensated for the review. If you do not disclose the compensation, you are violation of FTC rules.

• Don’t sweat the Negative Reviews.  No matter how well you and your team run your business, you will always receive negative reviews.  Why?  The Internet makes it very easy for people to anonymously and safely complain about anything.  Have you looked around online?  You’ve seen it.  People love to complain!  Here are some complaints we commonly see online:

- If you’re short a service writer one day and someone has to wait 5 minutes before they are helped, the customer can go online and complain.

- If your service tech got a touch of boot grease on the carpet, the customer can go online and complain.

- If the coupon they bring in is expired and you do not honor it, the customer can go online and complain.

- If the customer was shown a F&I menu after they said they were not interested in any extras, they can go online and complain.

- If the car you just sold is a dealer trade and the navigation disc is missing and they’ll have to wait until Parts is open tomorrow to get one, oh and the valet key is missing too, they can go online and complain.

You get the point.  Negative reviews are now just part of business.  The good news is they only hurt you if you allow them to.  If you let them accumulate to where they make-up a high-percentage of your reviews, then they make you look bad.  If you have 9 positive reviews for every 1 negative review than the positive outweighs the negative.  The problem is that 99% of your happy customers won’t leave positive reviews without some begging and pleading.  But if you get your customers to “spread the love” online, those negative reviews lose their power, visibility and importance.

Automotive Dealership Internet Reputation Management is not rocket science!  Here are the 3 keys to maintaining a Positive Internet Reputation.

1)      Monitor the web everyday for new mentions and reviews of your dealership

2)      Promptly and correctly respond to any negative reviews that warrant a response

3)      Call your customers, make sure they are happy, ask them to leave a review, get them to say they will, send them an email with instructions and links.  Watch the positive authentic reviews pour in.

Sounds easy right?  It is.  But in this economy, dealers are often stretched very thin and this is just one more thing you need to worry about.  Can this important responsibility be taken care of by someone in your dealership?  Only you can answer that.  However, for the dealer that doesn’t have the right person for the job and needs it done correctly and wants to see the results sooner than later, iMotive IRM is your answer.  We can monitor the Internet for you.  We can respond to negative reviews for you.  We can call your customers and ask them to “spread the love” about your dealership or business.  We can start improving your Online Reputation today.  Interested?  Questions? Visit www.imotiveconsulting.com or call us at (925) 408-8659.

Do you require your salespeople to follow up on incoming sales calls?

I recently covered the importance of handling incoming sales calls correctly and requiring salespeople to use scripts when answering calls.  Now I want to talk about the importance of properly following up on those incoming sales calls.

If your store is like many stores, your incoming sales call information is often written down on the back to business cards, sticky notes, brochures, and scraps of paper that are sitting on your salespersons desk.  What happens to this information once the call has ended?  If you keep an incoming sales call log, then it might get written down there.  However, most likely your customer’s information ends up in your salespersons pocket, in their desk drawer or thrown out with the trash.

As a whole, Dealerships need to do a much better job following up on incoming sales call prospects.  Once the call ends, this information needs to be immediately placed in a CRM and followed up just like any other lead or customer.  No matter how good your salespeople handle your incoming calls, there needs to be a process in place that requires them to enter the customer’s information into your CRM and follow up with that customer.

I’d advise everyone to investigate their sales processes to make sure that both Internet and Retail salespeople are actively following up on each and every call they take.  Don’t let your salespeople throw away these valuable opportunities!

Incoming Sales Calls

Question:  Are your incoming sales calls being answered by someone who uses a phone script for each and every call?

Customers who pick up the phone and call a dealership tend to be towards the end of the buying cycle, meaning they are closer to buying than many of your other lead sources.   People who pick up the phone and call you directly also tend to me much more educated because they are often in front of a computer (easy access to data) and have more choices of other dealers to call.

The majority of incoming sales calls usually deal with 2 things:

Price (can you beat a price or what is your best price)

Availability (Do you have a specific vehicle in stock)

We all know that these calls need to be handled perfectly and if they are not, than you lose a valuable opportunity.  Unfortunately, most salespeople just “wing it” when they answer the phone.  Why is this “just wing it” approach so common in our industry?

When you call Gieco for an insurance quote, the customer service rep doesn’t “wing it”.  They have a process in place that uses scripts, so that everyone who calls is asked the same questions and treated the same way.

Salespeople need processes.  Salespeople need to be trained on what to say and how to properly handle an incoming sales call.  Salespeople need to have scripts in front of them so that when they answer the phone they know exactly what to say.  Management needs to make sure that the script is being used on every call.

Dealers spend a large amount of time and money trying to get the phone to ring.  We challenge every dealer to make sure you have right processes in place that allow you make the most of every opportunity.  With all the excitement about new technological innovations that will help us sell more cars, let’s not forget about the phone!

Email Marketing – Dealers must start collecting emails!

We recently had some extraordinary results creating a sales email marketing campaign for a few of our Honda clients that wanted to take advantage of some Owner Loyalty incentives that Honda just announced.  These incentives are for a very limited time (11 days) and are perfectly matched for a strong email marketing campaign directed at current Honda owners.  Combined with the fact that Honda owners are extremely loyal and that American Honda rarely has incentives of this type, Honda dealers really have a great opportunity to capitalize on marketing this incentive to existing Honda owners.

Another Honda dealer heard about these sales results and contacted us today to create the same campaign for his store.  This store has a new GM and he was really excited about the opportunity to market these incentives to all of the stores previous customers.

The only problem is that this store doesn’t have any email addresses.  Sure they have a few hundred email addresses from active Internet leads, but that’s all they have!  NO Parts customers, NO Service customers, and NO sold customers!  The really unfortunate thing is this is still the rule and not the exception for many Dealers around the country.

All Dealers need to ask themselves the following questions:

●Do you have a process in place to collect an email address on every customer (Parts, Service, and Sales)?

●Do you have all of those email addresses in one easily accessible database?

●Do you have a storewide strategy in place to actively and creatively market to this list?

●Do you have the ability to quickly market to these customers (CRM, outside email service, etc)

If you answered no, you have some work to do!  Dealers need to get their heads out of the sand and embrace the opportunity to effectively market to their existing and past customer base.



Don’t Lose Focus On The Importance Of Process

As 2010 gets rolling, Auto Dealerships are finding themselves bombarded with calls to join the newest and hottest trends in the Internet Marketing revolution. The hottest trend currently is Dealership participation in online social media sites such as Facebook, MySpace and Twitter.  This is on top of the recent innovations of SEO, SEM, Microsites, Live Chat, Google Adwords, Online Video, etc.

While everything mentioned above is very important and much of it is essential to selling more cars in our modern world, it is extremely important not to lose focus on the basics of selling cars.

Here is a recent example we ran across while working with a new client.  While spending time with the client’s Internet Director, he bragged that he was posting a new Daily Used Car Special on their Dealership’s Facebook page every day.  Great Idea!  The problem was his internet department wasn’t selling any cars. Upon investigation the stores average response time for a new lead was over 8 hours and there was no internal process on how many times a new lead should be called.   This is a great example of a Dealer using the latest and greatest technology but failing to combine that technology with strong and proven internal sales processes.

So before you invest time and money on the newest and hottest technologies, be sure to ask yourself the following questions:

Who is responding to your leads?
How quickly are your leads being responded to?
Do you know many times each lead is being called?
Do you know how many emails each lead receives?
Are your salespeople using phone scripts?
Are you tracking 3^rd Party lead closing ratios?
Are you collecting email addresses for each customer?

I doubt anyone would argue that Facebook updates are more important than having strong internal sales processes or that Twitter Feeds are more important than having lightning fast response times to new leads.  So before you sign up for latest and greatest technology, take a step back and make sure you have not lost focus on your processes that are vital to selling cars.

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