What are you working on??

[Ryan Hartigan]

I absolutely love LotShot. There's something else about DealerRater that I absolutely love that I've been talking about and emphasizing for years... when used to its full capabilities, it WILL help change the culture of your dealership.

Shame on any dealership that places a "bad review" filter between the solicited experience and the customer. It's weak and nothing more than gaming the "system".

I could go on and on about this...

Ed, we should write a joint article around this for blog.

What do you mean by a "bad review" filter?

I had a dealer partner that got the highest ratings in the city by setting up AutoRaptor emails to go out to the positive customers encouraging them to write a review, and sending out emails that didn't mention DealerRater to the customers who had negative experiences.

They did a lot of in-house financing, a lot of 29.9% rates, and a lot of repossessions: it's crazy that they got such a good rating.

Meanwhile, my good friend had the best salesperson rating on there simply by being absolutely great at his job.

If you can game the system, there will always be people who will game the system.

I think that means there's problem with the system

 

[Alexandra Joseph]

Ok, I'm going to say something and you tell me if it sounds crazy.
What if you allowed ALL reviews on your site? AKA: you allowed negative reviews to be shown on your site?
I've been thinking a lot about it, and doing some research. Here are some numbers from a case study from my notes:
300% increase in test drive bookings
280% increase in time on site
2.4x more page views
...when reviews are on site.
Probably everyone here is on board with the premise that reviews are good to have on site.
But here's something else: 68% of consumers trust reviews more when there is a mix of positive and negative reviews, and 98% suspect fake reviews when they don't see any negative ones. That should be obvious, right?

I don't think it's such a horrible thing to have a negative review, as long as someone responds in a way that represents your brand with a great attitude. Everyone understands that it's impossible to please 100% of people. The dealership response is actually a really great opportunity to show how human and engaged you are with your clientele.

There are some best practices to minimize negative reviews, certainly. But what would it take to convince stakeholders that it would be ok to get rid of the filter and allow ALL reviews?
I have an idea for a product that would solve this issue--because it would take a lot of management on the dealership's part to do right.

p.s. those numbers are from a company called Reevoo, which has some interesting content about reviews. Not automotive specific.