Digital Dealer - August 2019 - 30

Road Trip to DD27 | AUG 19-21, 2019 | Las Vegas

DD27

M A R K E T I N G & A DVERT ISING: Re p u ta tio n /L o y al t y

Reaching for
High-Star Ratings
Two recent conversations prompted my
exploration into online
reputation and the discovery
of solutions to improve our
dealership's star rating.
The first was during a
meeting with our factory's
owner loyalty consultant.
While discussing online
reviews and our approach
to inviting customers to
leave us a review, she was
flabbergasted when I told
her, "We don't choose, we
invite everyone that interacts
with the dealership to leave
us a review." Her response
was, "Aren't you afraid you
will get a bad review?"
The other one happened
during lunch with one of our
credit union partners. While
brainstorming why they were
having difficulty growing
their membership, I asked,
"Do your current customers
like you?" His response was,
"I think they do. We survey
them once a year."
This led me to explore the
misconceptions about online
reviews and what it takes
to manage and improve a
business's reputation. After
some research, here's what
I found:
 90% of consumers
read online reviews before
making a purchase.
 84% of consumers
trusted online reviews as
much as personal referrals
 74% said that positive
30

AUGUST 2019

reviews made them trust a
local business more.(1)
After learning the large
role that reviews play in
the consumer purchase
process, I decided we had
to make some changes in
order for our dealership to
stand out. We started looking at our processes and
how we had changed them
over the years. Two years
ago, we were in the middle
of the pack when it came
to star ratings. Our 3.8-star
rating was OK, but it didn't
make us stand out in a market that was crowded with
players. We knew that we
had to make some changes
if we wanted to grow sales
and profitability.
Our first change made
was in how we solicited
reviews. Several vendors
provided us with handout
cards asking for reviews,
and we had an application
that salespeople and service
advisers could use to send
invites via text; However,
these all relied on someone to initiate the process.
Invites were issued on a
'hit or miss' basis, which
resulted in very few reviews.
Salespeople only invited
customers to leave a review,
if they thought they would
get a good review. We
weren't getting enough good
reviews to offset the few bad
reviews we were getting.
We found out pretty quickly

D I G I TA L D E A L E R . C O M

that it was hard work getting
our employees to buy into
our philosophy of "Every
Customer, Every Time." We
changed the process to a
fully automated system with
the humans completely out
of the loop. Then, every
customer that purchased/
serviced a vehicle was invited to leave a review on their
favorite review site. This
immediately increased the
number of reviews that were
being posted.
Since online reputation
scores are based on averages, our ratings started to
climb as soon as the number
of reviews increased. We
were doing a good job of
taking care of our customers, so I wasn't too scared of
a bunch of negative reviews.
For every 5-star review, you
can get one 1-star review,
and you would still have a
4.2-star rating; That was
better than where we were
coming from.
Change two was not far
behind. All of those new
reviews generated a lot of
extra work crafting responses, so we found a vendor
that would monitor all of
the review sites and write
responses that were appropriate for each review. They
would also let us preview
and edit each response, if
we felt the need. With this
addition we began to see
movement in our star rating.

FEATURE SPEAKER
By Mike Lee
Internet Director,
Melloy Nissan

We had never been great
at responding to reviews
and no one was specifically
designated to complete that
task. One person could now
monitor the responses and
stay on top of it daily with
minimal effort. We are now
able to spot trends and react
quickly if we see specific
problems in a department or
with a particular employee.
Implementing these two
changes cost the dealership
less than $1,000 a month.
The rewards were almost
immediate with a steady
increase in our online
reputation scores. We are a
high-volume dealer competing against Ford, Chevy,
Dodge, Honda, and Toyota
dealers every day. After
about a year, we passed all
of them with our 4.6 Google
star rating. In fact, we
passed Lexus, Mercedes,
Porsche, and BMW. Our
store currently has more
than 1,600 Google reviews
and we are maintaining our
lead in the market, but we
aren't satisfied. Our next
goal is to get to 4.8 Stars.
Learn more about how
to maintain the highest
star rating in your market
by joining Mike Lee for his
session at Digital Dealer
27 (Aug. 19-21, 2019, Las
Vegas, NV).
1

Source/Notes:
Forbes Magazine

MIKE LEE is the Internet
Director at Melloy Nissan. Mike
learned the automobile business
from the bottom up, serving as a
salesman, F& I Manager, Sales
Manager, F&I Director, GSM
and is currently Internet & Fleet
Director at a Melloy Nissan, a
large dealership in Albuquerque,
New Mexico.
http://www.DIGITALDEALER.COM
Digital Dealer - August 2019

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