Participating on the Carfolks.com site can provide an incredible boost to a professional’s prestige and allow him or her to take “their game” to the next level. Customers want to work with someone who is the best at their craft and it’s just amazing to see a sales professional execute a flawless presentation, qualify a prospect and then provide just the right choices for the vehicle shoppers.
The Carfolks site is designed to help every sales person achieve a higher level of professionalism. Here are answers to questions you may have about the program.
- What are the benefits of having a page on Carfolks?
The main benefit is to give you visibility online when auto shoppers are looking for highly rated sales professionals who provide a great buying experience.
Carfolks was designed from the ground up to help auto dealers and sales professionals to get visibility online and to reward you for doing things right. Your page allows you to introduce yourself to prospects and share information about yourself, your family and your professional experience and achievements.
Consumers making a major purchase like an automobile or truck want to feel comfortable with the person handling the transaction. They want a reason to trust you and Carfolks helps expedite building rapport between the shopper and the sales professional.
- What does it cost a dealership sales person to be on Carfolks?
Our standard page is FREE for individual sales professionals. Some limitations may apply as shared in our Terms and Usage document on the website. We will be introducing a Premier Page in the future which will have enhanced functionality. Participating dealerships on the Carfolks Marketing Program have additional benefits for their sales professional pages.
- If my dealership subscribes to the Carfolks Marketing Program can we take negative comments down?
NO! All posted comments go live immediately. When you subscribe to our Marketing Service we notify your dealership of any negative postings so you may contact the customer and resolve the issue. If the issue is resolved to the satisfaction of the customer, they may login and edit their review within 14 days of posting the comment. After that comments stay on our system and cannot be edited or removed unless they are found to be fraudulent. Other dealer ratings sites hold negative comments for 14 days. While that may benefit poor performing dealerships, it does not provide consumers with an immediate voice and create an urgency for a dealership to resolve an issue.
- What happens to my page if I leave the dealership and go to another dealership or quit the industry?
The pages of the individual sales people belong to them. If and when they leave their current dealership, all they need to do is logon to the site, and change or delete their dealership affiliation. Users can also change their email address at any time or add additional email addresses to their personal profile. All the ratings a professional has accumulated to that point will follow them to the new dealership. Their current dealership will also maintain those ratings on their dealership overall rating page. Once a dealership affiliation is deleted the individual salesperson’s photo and link will no longer appear on that dealers’ team page on the Carfolks site.
- How can I update our dealership information on Carfolks.com?
Just email dealerupdates@carfolks.com with the corrected information including name changes, franchise updates, address and phone changes. We will validate the information and make the updates to our directory.
- How does an auto shopper find my page?
Our Search Box allows consumers on Carfolks to search by salesman name, franchise, address, zip code or even your dealership name. Your ranking (if you have one) will be viewable by consumers as well. We do provide a specific URL address for each sales professional so you can email that to your customers to comment on your performance.
- Can I put a dealer or manufacturer logo on my personal page?
That functionality is not available on the standard pages. We hope to offer that functionality in the future as part of our new package. Dealership logos cannot be posted unless the dealership is a subscriber to the Carfolks Marketing Program.
- Can I embed a video of myself greeting visitors to my Carfolks page?
Yes you can embed an intro or greeting video or a customer testimonial video on your FREE standard page on Carfolks. You would just paste the embed code from your favorite video hosting site in your intro text box. The video should not take the place of your written text introduction. Other videos such as vehicle walk-arounds, dealership commercials, and inventory videos are not allowed on our standard pages.
- Who can post a review of a sales person or dealership?
At this time only actual customers of the dealership can post comments. That means they must have purchased a vehicle or brought a vehicle into the service department or body shop for repairs. By using various databases, vehicle history reports, motor vehicle records, etc. we can validate a consumer is an actual customer of a dealership. At this time we have no way to validate whether a consumer visited or shopped at a particular dealership, so posting comments about a shopping experience may not provide accurate information for consumers. If you have any suggestions on how we can accomplish this we would like to hear your thoughts on the process.
- How do I communicate with consumers on the site?
You may put your local or cell phone number and/or email address on your personal page. Participating (subscribing) dealers can have toll free phone numbers on dealership landing page as well as each employee’s personal page. A simple contact us form will be available soon for each sales professional’s page and anyone interested in contacting you for information or to set an appointment will be using that form.
- When a consumer searches for a sales person how are the results ranked?
Results will be ranked first by our customer feedback system (within the distance selected), and then by distance after that. This gives sales professionals and dealerships with high positive feedback an advantage, and motivation to continue to provide great buying experiences for your customers. We are using a Five Star system with five stars being the highest ranking one can attain.
- How does Carfolks insure that ratings are legitimate?
Anyone rating a salesperson or dealership must validate their identity on Carfolks and provide information which helps us identify the person posting the review. We also implement security protocols that will help us identify fraudulent users and other members who might try to “game the system.”
If we identify a member of our community who fraudulently enters a review that either gives themselves a good rating or gives a competitor a bad rating, we will take action against that person and have the option to “mark their account” indicating they were not honest in their behavior in the community. We strongly encourage all members to play by the rules or risk the negative consequences to their reputation.
Additionally any member of the Carfolks neighborhood or visitor can question or comment on a review. If it is believed to be fraudulent we will ask the person submitting the review to provide further validation of their experience. Users questioning a review must provide their information too.
- How long will it take before my page on Carfolks starts coming up in the search engines?
Our site works to optimize content for all the sales professionals and dealers on our website. The search engine “web crawlers” visit sites on a regular basis and index content so results in search engines will vary. Usually within a few weeks our comments will be coming up in the popular search sites. The volume of customer ratings you have on the page are also important as they provide “user generated content” (UCG) which is ranked high by the search engines, so each member should actively invite their customers to logon and rate them. It is in your best interest to invite all your customers to come out and review you on Carfolks. More ratings mean more visibility on the Internet.
- How does my dealership get removed from your directory?
We do not remove dealerships from our directory unless the dealership goes out of business. If a dealership sells vehicles to the public, then we allow consumers to comments about how that dealership and their people treated them during the sales or service process.
- If our dealership doesn’t subscribe to the Carfolks Marketing Program can we reply to reviews posted about our dealership.
Yes. An individual registered on Carfolks from the dealership can reply to a comment about that dealership. This means the comment is now part of their page. They take ownership of that review and it impacts their ranking in our system. Carfolks reserves the right to limit the number of times a dealership may respond to negative comments on the site.
- Do you offer help to new sales professionals to set up their pages?
Yes, we offer our Getting Started Guide to provide advice on how to maximize your presence and participation on Carfolks. We also notify participants when updates or changes are made to this guide.
- Do I have to post a photograph on the site?
No, but we strongly encourage you to post a photo. People always want to put a face to a voice on the phone or an email sender. Remember customers come in all shapes, sizes, and colors so don’t worry about looking different. We are all unique in someway, and Carfolks will help you make it work for you!
- Who do I call or email for help with my pages?
You may email us at admin@carfolks.com for assistance or call us at 216-712-6712 for phone support.
