Automotive News - October 25, 2021 - S24

24 | OctOber 25, 2021
VAN HORN AUTOMOTIVE GROUP, PLYMOUTH, WIS.
Texts help solicit customer reviews
Group manually sends
messages to improve,
ease feedback process
Published in Automotive News May 10, 2021
Alexa St. John
autonews@crain.com
Customers are looking for the most convenient
start-to-finish car-shopping experience
they can find, one that better aligns with their
habits. They're also looking to do business
with dealerships for which they can find positive
reviews online.
Five years ago, Van Horn Automotive Group,
based in Plymouth, Wis., found itself struggling
to get customers to leave reviews once
they left with their purchased vehicle.
So when the group started thinking about
ways to get more customers
to leave feedback, one of
the first things that came to
mind was the ease and familiarity
of texting.
" The obvious goal was:
Tasche: People
like the medium.
How do we boost our ratings
on Google? How do
we start getting positive
feedback? " said Tina
Tasche, customer relationship
management and
reputation specialist at Van Horn, which has
16 new and used car dealerships in Wisconsin
and Iowa retailing Kia, Chrysler, Dodge, Jeep,
Ram, Ford, Chevrolet, Hyundai, Mazda, Nissan,
Volkswagen and Alfa Romeo.
" People who have less than favorable opinions
find you on Google easily to leave you reviews, "
Tasche told Automotive News. " The
challenge was, how do we get to get all these
happy customers - because we know they're
out there - to leave feedback for us? "
Solutions
She said the group struggled with how to
make the process easy for customers. " You
used to hand out a postcard with the Web URL
on it to DealerRater or Google or somehow get
your customers there. "
Van Horn - which sold about 16,300 vehicles
last year - 4,800 new and 11,500 used -
began using Podium, a text-message management
service, in 2016. The service's reputation
management option made reaching out to
customers less complicated and helped cusTexting
has proved to be useful for communicating with customers about service and after they
purchase vehicles from Van Horn Automotive Group, which has 16 new- and used-vehicle stores.
tomers leave Van Horn reviews as easily as
sending a text message. Van Horn first integrated
Podium into two of its dealerships,
though it's " now a staple that we have in every
dealership, " Tasche said.
" Not only was it easy for our staff to send, it
was easy for our customers to leave that feedback, "
she said. " There was going to need to be
a streamlined way to accumulate positive reviews.
What we've found is if you have an easy
way for your happy customers to leave you
feedback, they will. "
Van Horn has received 30,000 reviews since
it started using Podium, including 9,000 in
2020 alone.
The success of soliciting reviews via text led
Van Horn to add two more of Podium's features:
Teamchat, which enables intracompany
chat, and Webchat, which funnels conversations
from Google, social media platforms
and Van Horn's website into one conversation
platform. Van Horn launched a fourth, Podium's
payments product, in April, which enables
text-to-pay.
" For a customer, all they see is a texting
thread - it's the same place they're texting
with Mom and their friends, " Tasche said. " It's
familiar to them. "
Wisconsin's Van Horn Automotive
Group uses a text-messaging service
to provide customers an easier way
to submit reviews.
Texting does take buy-in from some customers,
Tasche said. Van Horn didn't see a
major increase in reviews until two years into
sending the link via text.
" You do have to still cater to all demographics
and what people want. We're still here to
pick up the phone, " Tasche said. " It's important
to recognize that every customer is going
to have their own unique interpretation of
how they want to be communicated with. "
'Personal touch'
One way Van Horn keeps the process personal
is by manually sending each text, she
said.
" For a while we relied a lot on automation, "
Tasche said. " Over the last two years, we've
stopped using automation and are instead
manually sending out every single invitation
that our customers receive, and the reason behind
that is we find higher conversion rates
with the personal touch. "
But to Van Horn, it's clear that texting is successful
and growing more so: Of Van Horn's
100,000 conversations over the past five years,
60,000 took place just in 2020.
" Just off the increase in volume of text inquiries
that we saw last year, it really shows a hunger
out there with consumers of wanting to
use this texting medium to interact with us, "
Tasche said.
" You can send 12 emails, leave six voicemails
and hear nothing from someone, but
the second their phone dings with a text message,
all of a sudden, they come to life. " c

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