Your dealership’s reputation is important, and it must be protected. This is why you need to understand online reviews and their impact.
Customers who visit your dealership to shop for vehicles or take advantage of services offered have the opportunity to have their voices heard by posting comments, opinions, and experiences online. These reviews have the ability to boost your reputation or harm it, depending on what customers have to say. Once you understand the role online reviews play in your dealership’s reputation, you’ll want to pay much closer attention to them.
Reviews build trust with potential customers
Do you utilize reviews to make decisions? Most people do this by looking at reviews of products, services, and businesses to understand what their friends and neighbors think. These reviews have replaced word of mouth as one of the most important forms of advertising and reputation building for most companies. Car dealerships must have stellar reviews to entice shoppers to buy with them. Buying a car is an enormous financial and emotional decision and shouldn’t be taken lightly. Potential shoppers can read various reviews and choose to work with your team or look elsewhere.
Although you want your reviews to be positive, it’s also important that you address any negative reviews from customers. When you show how you corrected the frustrations in a negative review, you’ll give potential customers a more complete look at how your team handles challenges.
They show what your team has done
How did your team help other customers through the car buying decision or with their service needs? Did someone buy a car that stopped working correctly? If so, how did your dealership handle the situation? Having strong online reviews that tell a complete story can help new shoppers understand how your team operates and what they have done to help previous customers.
A large amount of positive online reviews helps show potential buyers that you’ve taken good care of customers and helped them have a positive experience at your dealership. When your reviews show that you’ve met the demands of various customers, others will be willing to give your team a chance.
Your biggest customer service thermometer
If your dealership team is great at customer service, it will show up in your reviews. The same is true if your team isn’t very good at taking care of your customers. Thankfully, you’ll probably find the former to be the case and should have a strong collection of positive online reviews to share with potential customers.
A great way to share your positive reviews is to turn them into videos for ads that can be seen by potential customers. These positive review videos can be shared on your social media accounts and be a great way to grab the attention of future customers who will love to work with your team.
Reviews are huge for decision making
Your car dealership sells cars, but so does the dealership down the street, the one across town and the other one around the corner. In most towns, you can find several car dealerships on the same street, almost side by side; what will make yours stand out compared to some of the others? Some studies suggest that 83% of buyers use online reviews as part of their decision-making process when buying a product. Considering the average price of a vehicle, buyers are likely to put even more weight into your reviews.
They help increase your visibility
When you have a large number of good reviews, you’ll have the visibility and brand awareness you want to let potential customers understand what they get from your team. All search engines index content for users with the best options at the top of the search page. This could mean your reviews can push your dealership to the top of the list compared to another location.
When your dealership has a large number of positive online reviews, the search engines will favor your business over one that’s ranked a little lower. This gives you a stronger position during the initial search that your next round of customers makes online.
What should you do?
Your online reviews are a massive part of the car buying process for most shoppers. It’s important that you have a long list of positive reviews to show customers, which means you need to cultivate these reviews by asking for them from your customers, especially when they have had a great experience with your team.
