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I just held a follow up webinar to my workshop at the Automotive Marketing Boot Camp on Reputation Management. I waited for a few weeks to see what dealers who attended would implement and how their progress was going. I wanted to share results from three people because it covers a lot of situations you may run into.
First person to offer up comments said that it was going slowly because they had a “Digitally Challenged boss”. They were doing it all themselves. They wanted to implement new ideas but their boss did not want to hear about changes.
My Suggestion: work on getting one salesperson and one service advisor who are advocates of his and ask them to get people to post. Once you had some positive reviews posted and feedback from these “helpers” in the dealership was how easy it was to get customers to post and how they feel it is important, your boss may see things differently. Remember without specific details, your boss will think changes are drastic, time consuming and will take too much to implement. Start slowly.
The second person had great news. They took 2 stores from their group and in one month had over 100 reviews each using techniques from the workshop.
They implemented the use of I-pads very effectively. They ran a raffle for employees with the winner receiving an I-pad. The great way they ran the contest was that for each review the employee got a ticket to put in the raffle jar and then one ticket was chosen. They also took the winning department out to dinner on the company, which turned out to be the service department.
Comments: Notice they said service got the most reviews but in many dealerships, service is not the place they choose to focus on reviews even though they have 3 times the volume of sales. Dealers are afraid of bad reviews but remember what we discussed. Customers will tell you where you are falling short so that you can address and improve. Don’t hide. It does not fix any problems.
Secondly they involved everyone in the dealership by giving employees a ticket per review. If they just counted total reviews, you would have had one or two people contending for the I-pad and the people who are on the low end would give up because they will not win. By giving value to each reviews/ticket, people keep pushing till end of the contest. You never know if the last ticket on the last day was the winner.
Lastly, they took the team out not the top service person. This again creates a team mentality that they are all in this together.
Great job to this individual and their teams. They are going to begin rolling this out to their other stores in the group.
Third person: This dealer focuses on using both Dealer Rater and Presto Review platforms. He works on getting people to do an in-house review with Presto and then follows up with an email asking them to go to Dealer Rater as well. He has seen great success using this tactic.
His struggle was with getting his whole team involved from both sales and service. He has decided to play on the “ego” of the employees in 2 very cool ways. First he has a flat screen in the waiting area with reviews rolling so people can see them. Sales people love seeing their name up there and employees kid each other when they see their name up and not someone else’s. Don’t underestimate the effectiveness of a team pushing each other to be successful. Get them started and get out of their way.
Secondly he uses the SEO capability of the Presto Review platform to optimize the reviews not only for the car or service but also for the name of the salesperson. He then shows the salesperson or advisor how when they Google their own name they dominate the first few pages of Google because they are accumulating reviews. This is exciting for the employee.
Then he told me something that made me really proud. He taught the sales and service people to use their Presto Reviews website when they are in the appraisal process or getting initial information. They pull up the reviews and let the potential customer read reviews, saying “see what other people have said about me and why they did business with us”. Some may say it is a bit cocky but it has increased business so why not be proud of your results.
In the book “Influence, the Power of Persuasion” by Robert Caldini, he states that we as people like to be part of a winning team. I could not agree more in regards to getting reviews. If you have set up posters, POS products, email templates, dialogue from your personnel all focusing on wanting feedback from the customer, and then when a customer goes online to post they see large amounts of people who have previously posted they will also want to be part of that team.
No one wants to be left out.
I want to thank those who participated in the follow up webinar and sharing their successes and also their struggles. We will continue the dialogue and I look forward to seeing you at a Reputation Management Workshop in the future.
Glenn Pasch is the COO of PCG Digital Marketing and the President of Improved Performance Solutions.