Consumers are taking control online. This is nothing new to most of us in auto retailing. Over the last 12 years the average consumer can glean extensive information, reviews, pricing, availability and ownership history on just about any product you can think of. Since autos are a major purchase item we have gotten extensive scrutiny about our sales process.
We have also seen a boom in social media and product review sites. If you do any traveling at all you are probably familiar with www.TripAdvisor.com. Pick a destination or airline and you can view lots of brutally candid remarks about local hotels, restaurants and other travel related items. I recently attended the NIADA Convention in Orlando and went looking for inexpensive (cheap) lodging on TripAdvisor. I found lots of hotel rooms under $60 rooms but after reading reviews like, “better than sleeping at the bus station, but not by much . . .” I decided to move up a bit and avoid the bargain basement hotels.
The point is we can find information on any or everything including how a car dealer takes care of, or doesn’t take care of their customers. 
After ten plus years on the Internet most auto shopping consumers know that any dealer can meet or beat any legitimate price. So now we are seeing online auto shoppers look for ways to identify which dealers will give them a great buying experience, before, during and after the sale. The new term you will be hearing about more and more is SERM. This stands for Search Engine Reputation Management. Dealers need to have a strategy to not only give customers a place to voice their grievances but to post their praise for the dealership too.
The question is not whether you like or dislike reviews of your dealership, the question is now, what you are going to do to build, enhance and protect your reputation online. If you think this isn’t an issue go to google.com and enter the term “Vincent Volkswagen” in the search box. In the top five organic results you will see one or two negative sites about this dealership. In talking to a few marketing experts in the field, they conservatively estimate those listings are costing the dealership 5 lost sales a month. At an average gross of $2000 per sale, the dealership is losing $120,000 a year in sales, not to mention lost service business too. This is a good dealership, but they had an unhappy customer who felt their situation wasn’t handled properly and they voiced their frustration and complaint in a very visible fashion.
You need to have a strategy that makes it easy for customers to say nice things about your sales and service team members. Help them build their personal reputations, and identify customers that have issues you need to address and correct. Explore participating in ratings and review sites and monitor what is being said about you online. Quickly address issues, fix the problems and highlight all the good things you do at your store.
