Auto Dealer Monthly Magazine is the daily operations publication serving the retail automotive industry. This automotive publication serves dealer principals, officers and general managers with the latest best practices.
Issue link: http://autodealermonthly.epubxp.com/i/79640
over the curb / parting thoughts Unpleasant Surprises An 18-year former dealer principal with focus on Special Finance since 1989, Greg Goebel is CEO of Auto Dealer Monthly, LLC, the parent company of Greg Goebel Training & Consulting. He is a leading industry consultant, trainer, author and speaker serving retail automotive dealers. Contact Greg at 941.685.9629. Greg@AutoDealerMonthly.com I find? O pened my browser, searched for ABC Motors and what did "I had a nightmare experience with ABC Motors. Not only did they do a bait-and-switch after contacting me and having me drive over two hours, they overpromised and didn't deliver. Took me six months, but I wound up taking them to court, getting what I wanted and winning the case. Do not believe what they say or promise, even if it's in writing. Worst car experience ever!" Ouch! I came across this recently when searching for something for one of my clients. The bad thing is, it was searching better than ABC's website. Worse yet, I realized they were actually paying for it. Now, like a customer, I am hooked. I kept looking. The next review was just as bad and even more descriptive. The third one commented they wouldn't recommend them to their worst enemy. At the same time, nine other neigh- boring dealers came up with good reviews showing. I don't want to paint the picture that this dealer is a bad one—certainly, they have many more reviews that are positive than negativebut 50 when someone goes looking and sees three "strikes" in a row, in most cases that dealer is out. Believe it or not, this dealership really does care about their customers. So what did I do? I contacted my client and told them what I had found, of course, assum- ing they were already aware of it and had a plan in place to combat it. To my surprise, they were oblivious, and it wasn't feigned ignorance. Talk about a meltdown on the phone. I know they immediately went into damage-repair mode, as two of their top sales man- agers called me incessantly for two days, seemingly thinking I was the right hand of Google and DealerRater and could make these things disappear. This oblivion is common in many dealerships. With as much money that is spent on digital marketing in dealer- ships, it is amazing how d isconnected many dealers and upper-level management are from what happens when someone searches for their store. For those of you not attending the 2012 Industry Summit this month in Las Vegas, you are missing a session by digital marketing expert Tom White of DrivingSales, who will be discussing the importance of online reviews in overall marketing plans. It is a session that goes into painstaking detail of why reviews are vital to your business, how devas- tating they can be and how to combat negative reviews, even if a couple were actually deserved. Let me quickly offer some advice. First, you really do have to care about your customers and employees. If you don't, in this transparent world, someone is going to let everyone online know about it, and it may even be in the form of videos. (Oh, by the way, while really painful to watch as a member of the industry, there are some amazing and entertaining hidden-camera videos online about dealers. They search well, too.) Assuming you really do have a good customer satisfaction culture and policies in place, the next step is to be aware. Do you regularly sit down at the computer and search for your dealership or your name and see what comes up? Whether it comes up good or bad, you need to have a plan for getting good reviews online. I know many dealers who are doing a great job with the use of iPads or tablet computers at the sales desk. They are also having the sales team ask for and help the customer write a good review while they are waiting to go into the F&I; office. The dealers spread the reviews around where they need them most, often incentivizing their sales team for getting a certain number of positive reviews each month on a particular search engine(s). Obviously, some are more difficult to tap into than othersGoogle, for example, now requires a Google Plus account. Certainly, with Yahoo, Bing, Yelp, CitySearch, etc., there are many places you can and should focus on. Regardless of what your plan is, the impor- tant thing here is to actually have a plan and ensure it is carried out. I grant that some people, like me, feel awkward about asking people to write a recommendation for them, but in a retail environment where most anyone in a franchise store knows they are going to be surveyed by the factory anyway, it is better to ask and find out early rather than later! Finally, many dealers are now using reputation products they not only control themselves, but can also use to help dealership rank well in search. These are neat tools that at the very least assist in building credibility and at the same time make it simple for customers to make the jump directly from the reviews to the dealer's inventory or finance pages without a competing dealership jumping in their path. Until next month, keep your eyes open! Greg Goebel Publisher