4 Best Practices to Increase Positive Online Reviews

When you are in the auto industry, you want to be consistently showcasing positive experiences and excellent reviews, but to do that you need to HAVE the reviews. It can be all too easy to forget about the value of reviews, and when you forget why they are so important, it isn’t hard to forget to ask for them. With that, your review sites may become inundated with organic reviews which typically tend to skew towards the negative. Customers who had an unfortunate negative experience generally need little motivation to go online and complain about their issue, however the majority of your clients that were happy don’t often think to go online and speak positively about their experience.

70% of customers will ONLY go online to speak positively about their experience if they are prompted to and if it’s made simple for them too.

Review and Reputation Management partners can automate the entire review solicitation and management process. You don’t have to think about it nearly as much, and you can still get great reviews for your dealership.

Below are some recommended best practices to put in place at your dealership to make sure you are gaining more positive reviews and utilizing those reviews to get more customers through the door. It’s important to note that these practices can be automated with an integrated solution.

1. Ask for reviews. The first step is to send personalized texts or emails to every single customer. If you don’t ask, the majority will not leave a review. It’s not because they don’t want to, it’s generally because they get busy, or they don’t even know where to leave a review for you. It’s time to take the guesswork out of it for them and make sure that no one gets missed. Have your Google My Business page or Facebook Recommendations links handy and make sure to send them out after every customer interaction. Text messaging generally sees the most results, but email is still very effective.
2. Be aware of all your review profiles. Most dealerships have profiles on multiple sites where consumers can leave reviews and it’s critical you are checking all of them daily. Cars.com, Dealer Rater, Google, Yelp, and Facebook are the most popular for the automotive industry, but many dealers are unaware that they have other review profiles on the web. Sites like Better Business Bureau, Yellow Pages, Yahoo Local, and City Search are also common sites that many dealers may be surprised to find reviews about their business. There are over 180 different review sites on the web and keeping track of them all can be difficult, but just a few bad reviews that never got properly responded to can have a major impact on your reputation. Thus, it’s important to monitor the web daily.
3. Always respond to your reviews. Responding to your online reviews is almost as important as the review itself. At the beginning of the buyers-journey they are doing research online. 70% of buyers conduct online research before stepping foot inside your dealership. Buyers not only want to see what others are saying about their experience with your dealership, but they also want to see how you handled those experiences. When it comes to negative reviews, the buyer wants to see how you would respond should an issue arise with their experience. It’s important to remember the three “P”’s always respond Promptly, Publicly, & Professionally.
4. Market your best reviews. Your positive online reviews literally can become a marketing engine for your dealership. Always share your most positive reviews on your website and social media. Online reviews are considered the most authentic form of advertising. The new “Word-Of-Mouth” is all happening online, and you want to make sure that your potential buyers are easily finding those positive reviews.

85% of millennials trust online reviews as much as a personal recommendation.

With the new Autosoft and Bluejay Reviews integration you can automate this whole process.

Bluejay can:

• Automatically send out review request.
• Monitor all review sites in one place.
• Allow you to respond to all review sites from one smart phone app or online dashboard.
• Set it up for automatic responses if you’d like.

Bluejay will automatically share your most positive reviews on your social media and website, plus a lot more. With the Bluejay Surveys, Webchat, and Competitive Benchmarking tools you can leverage every client interaction and turn that into new business. This program takes the responsibility of having to manage your online reviews and reputation out of your hands so you can focus on the immediate needs of your dealership. If you’d like to learn more visit www.BluejayReviews.com/Autosoft

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Michael White

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