Automotive Reputation management Basics

Turning an automotive business into a success story requires a lot of work. This is especially true in the digital age where offering a positive customer experience at your dealership or auto shop alone isn’t going to cut it.

How to reach success then?

A strong digital presence achieved through automotive reputation management.

Reputation management is nothing but a set of practices that ensure your business looks attractive to potential customers. This might seem like a daunting task for newcomers, especially for ones that consider doing it manually. However, with the latest technology, automotive reputation management can be simpler if you know what you’re doing.

In today’s blog, we’re taking a closer look at reputation management and how you can do it even better through automation.

Off we go!

What is automotive reputation management?

A more technical definition of reputation management is that it’s a practice that combines different strategies to monitor and improve a business's reputation.

The online aspect of a business is one of the main factors in success. This is because most customers make purchasing decisions after a healthy amount of online research. In other words, if your online presence isn’t squeaky clean doesn’t, it could actually harm your business.

For example, take a common search term like ‘’car dealerships near me’’. The first things that pop up are Google Business Profile listings. Potential customers can see the addresses and phone numbers of these businesses, but most importantly they can also see customer reviews.

A survey conducted in 2022 revealed that more than 70% of consumers always read online reviews when browsing for businesses. Additionally, only 3% of participants would choose a business with a low star rating.

While reviews do affect your revenue directly, they also play a crucial role in your local search engine rankings. Google’s algorithm considers several factors, such as:

1. The total number of reviews 

2. How recent are the reviews

3. Review diversity

4. How many review platforms do you have reviews on

One of the major parts of automotive reputation management is review management itself. Let’s start with the most important aspect which is generating new reviews.

How to generate new reviews

Creating a constant stream of positive feedback is the best way to kickstart your online reputation. The way you go about it makes all the difference.

Here are some techniques you can try to receive a lot of quality feedback from your customers:

1. Asking all of your customers to leave reviews

To make the most out of your review generation endeavor, you should ask all of your customers to leave reviews. While you might be compelled to ask only the ones that are most likely to leave a positive review, we don’t recommend doing that.

While it’s true you might end up with a less favorable review or two by asking all customers, negative feedback isn’t all that bad. Today’s customers value authenticity, so a business with a spotless five-star rating across the board might ring alarm bells. 

2. Find the perfect timing

With reviews, it’s best to strike while the iron is hot, so to speak. In other words, timing is one of the most important things to consider when generating new reviews. You need to ensure you remind your customers while their satisfaction is at an all-time high. This is usually on the day of the sale or the service. 

Just put yourself in the shoes of your customers, you are more likely to take the time out of the day when the experience is still fresh in your mind. Whereas, if you were contacted by a business a month later and asked to leave a review, you would procrastinate before forgetting altogether.

3. Send a reminder

In a similar vein, your customer might say yes to leaving a review while they are at the counter, but as soon as they’re on their way home, they’ll usually forget about doing it. 

To stop losing out on quality positive reviews, you should implement a system that lets you remind your customers to leave a review. For example, you could send a text or an email on the same day they interacted with your business.

This is also the most painless way for customers to leave a review, which is something they will appreciate. 

With a text or an email containing a link to your Google Business Page, you’re making it easy for your customers to leave a review. Let’s be real - some customers would give up if they had to minimize Netflix and look up your business listing, so a review link in a text is a win-win situation for you and the customer.

4. Automate reviews

Additionally, automotive reputation management isn’t something you do once, reap the rewards, and bail - it requires consistent effort.

While generating reviews is certainly possible to do manually, the question is: do you have the time to do it consistently every day? Running a business is tough in itself, and sending out reviews every day for every customer is just an unnecessary extra workload. 

The good news is that you can automate the entire process. With new technology, you can automate the process of generating reviews without lifting a finger, without sacrificing quality.

ReviewArm allows you to send out review requests automatically every time you close a sale. Alternatively,  you can also send out review requests in bulk through our dashboard. 

This removes any friction in the automotive reputation management process and helps you capitalize on the right timing for asking for a review - without even thinking.

Responding to reviews

Responding to reviews is another crucial component of automotive reputation management. 

In the survey we mentioned earlier, almost 90% of participants said they are likely to choose a business that responds to most reviews, and more than 50% would rather avoid a business that doesn’t respond to reviews.

While responding to positive feedback is much easier as all you have to do is thank the customer and give them a pat on the back, negative reviews are a bit more challenging.

Remember not to take it personally, don’t lose your cool, and figure out a great response. 

As a rule of thumb, you should validate their opinion, stay polite and professional and apologize for their negative experience. We recommend giving the customer additional contact information they can use to contact you if they wish to discuss things offline. 

If they do reach out and you manage to resolve the issue offline, you can simply ask them to edit the review or take it down. 

Automating review responses

Responding to each review manually would take too much time, especially if you are registered on multiple review platforms. The same applies to keeping track of new reviews.

Since ReviewArm is a comprehensive automotive reputation management platform, it provides you with an intuitive dashboard that allows you to monitor multiple platforms and respond to feedback from one place.

With our dashboard, you will receive a notification every time a customer leaves a review. You’ll also be able to respond directly from the dashboard without logging in to multiple sites.

Automotive reputation management made easy

By putting more effort into automotive reputation management, you’ll quickly be able to see the fruits of your labor. Your ranking will drastically improve, you’ll receive more leads, and new customers will line up in front of your business.

Again, managing your reputation manually would be too time-consuming. While hiring a staff member for automotive reputation management is possible, this option would be too expensive.

ReviewArm is a perfect middle ground. You can automate the entire process, thus saving valuable time. But with our pay-as-you-go model, our platform is accessible to all businesses.

Use our contact form to sign up, and we will give you a full rundown of how ReviewArm can help you grow your business!