Fake reviews: Attempting to generate fake reviews or paying for reviews is unethical and against Google’s policies. If discovered, it can lead to severe consequences, including removal of reviews and even suspension of the dealership’s Google account.

Overly aggressive solicitation: Pushing customers too hard to leave reviews can backfire. If customers feel pressured or bombarded with review requests, they may leave negative feedback or ignore the request altogether.

DealTimer has special technology to avoid this problem and still enable 100s of customers to give Google Reviews while still there are at the dealership and requested by sales reps and service advisors. This is a technology-driven innovation from DealTimer only to avoid multiple Google Reviews from the Dealership Wifi-router IP  address.

Dealers have to ensure their staff or 3rd party vendors responding to Google Reviews are properly instructed on this sensitive matter of not revealing customers’ complete information of full name, address, phone numbers, email address, etc.

Time to Respond to Google Reviews directly boosts existing customer loyalty for caring for customers, boosts Google’s view of dealership caring, and either can bring future customers with good responses or drive customers away with poor or delayed responses. Customers’ do gauge on how much importance the dealership is giving for customer opinions and feedback reviews.

Do not trust vendors and marketing consultants they can help Google Reviews generation and responding to boost SEO with extra smart writing. It is always the best to be natural in receiving customers’ own review writing and responding to review to the point it is needed

DealTimer CSI Center responds to the Google Reviews with optimal response to the point it is required. DealTimer’s CSI ticketing engine supports involvement of Service Manager and General Manager in writing response to customer negative reviews in a collaborative manner. Please reach out DealTimer for more info in this regard.

Dealers have to stay away from malpractices in generating and bulk posting of Google Reviews. Though it looks promising, DealTimer assures you that Google is smart enough to catch all the malpractices in bulk Google review posting.

Solution: Why go through shortcuts for bulk review posting, when DealTimer has a natural way to generate 60-100 Google reviews per month for dealerships’ existing customers? Google is smart enough to figure out if the review was generated by the customer or 3rd party fraud companies because Google has ‘location services’ and ‘geo-codes’ to identify all malpractices.

It is very important for dealerships not to entertain in tampering or influencing the Google Review content either directly through their own staff or indirectly through the 3rd party vendors.

Solution: DealTimer has tools to analyze customer reviews and assess in case manipulation happens in the review generation. Though it does not happen always,  a rival dealership can engage in such practices of getting written off Google Reviews with language manipulation and get caught and remove many Google reviews from the Google  Business Profile.

Review Bombing: Encouraging a large group of people to leave negative reviews in response to a particular incident can artificially damage a dealership’s reputation and is considered a form of manipulation.

Solution: DealTimer’s CSI ticketing engine can quickly notice ‘review bombing’ and alert the management. In case the review bombing language points to the criminal act from the past employees, DealTimer can monitor such acts and getr all such reviews removed instantly

Even if the companies are smart at generating unique review templates in generating reviews, Google can still catch the same review content posting sources using several other trackable parameters.

Solution: These duplicate content reviews can easily be caught by DealTimer tools.

Astroturfing: Creating fake accounts to leave positive reviews can backfire if these accounts are identified as inauthentic.

Solution: DealTimer’s CSI system has capability to check if the Google Business Profile exists for all customers in DMS in advance and avoid Astroturfing in such review are generated.

Violations: It is very important to be sensitive in reaching out to customers and respecting their clicks, views, and review responses and give them a deserved break in attempting for Google Review.

Solution: DealTimer’s CSI system has the capability to capture customer feedback and respect their feelings and give them the break they indicate in further communications. Often giving customers to be contacted in several channels of email, sms, phone calls, chat messengers, etc, we get a feel for customer-preferred modes of communication and engaging customers in those modes in the future would appeal to the customers and also DealTimer receives more than 400% customer feedbacks, Google Reviews, and also OEM surveys. 

Lack of Technology: It is humanly impossible to keep track of all negatively reviewed customers and cross-verify if they are returning to the dealerships or not,  DealTimer built a specialist CSI software for this purpose.

Solution: Do you know if you convert ten negatively reviewed customers with 1-star and 2-star reviews to 5 stars, the dealership’s Google Review Ratings can jump from 3.7 to 4.0 in just a matter of a few weeks?  Please reach out to DealTimer if your dealership’s Google Review rating is below 4.3 by filling out the form at the bottom of this page and we will provide free consulting in this area! 

Google Policy Change can be a boon: In the past Google used to give a small window, say a 7-day window for the dealership to respond to negative Google Review and if the resolution reached appealing to the customer, then the customer had an opportunity to change the 1-3 star  Google Reviews to 4-5 star Google reviews. Now, Google lifted that window and made it a lifelong opportunity to resolve customer negative reviews.  So there is no need to take a negatively reviewed customer as a lost customer for lifetime!

Solution: DealTimer is the only vendor with the CSI Booster platform that addresses negativity captured in Social Reviews, DealTimer reviews, OEM Surveys, and other sources of review capturing. These sources give DealTimer a 400% chance of converting a negatively reviewed customer into a positive experience on Google and hence DealTimer has the ability to change the Google Review rating very quickly. 

Social Reviews and Reputation have become a no-man land:

• Myth #1: A busy GM thinks it is an internet manager’s job or a marketing manager’s
  job to get more Google Reviews.
  Truth: Internet Manager probably sells only 20% of cars and does not have chemistry with 1000s of service repair customers, not the rest of the sold deals!
  A marketing manager never sees customers, nor has the technology to capture Google Reviews.
• Myth #2 – It is the responsibility of the 3rd Party Vendor chosen by OEM in a top-down manner.
  Truth:  Can you give your baby to your neighbor to take care of all the time? No, right? Then why are we mortgaging Social Reputation to manufacturers to choose a vendor and capture Google Reviews? 
• Myth #3: Why manufacturer is rubbing into Dealer’s Reputation vendor selection process?
  This happened over the years because the dealership started ignoring Social Reviews, ratings, and especially bad Google Reviews and Ratings for decades and the manufacturer had to back up the dealership’s ignorance and then select a vendor and force the dealership to pay for the reputation packages from $200 to $1000 per month.
  Solution: If we dig into the responsibility of Social Reputation, DealTimer can write a book with 100s of myths in this category that the dealership management has been overlooking in this area alone!   There is a separate book of 200 pages being published in this area in 2024 for dealership GMs and owners to learn about this forgotten area that is costing the dealerships hundreds of thousands of dollars in both lost revenue and potential expansion capabilities due to ignored Reputation and CSI affecting the marketing programs dearly.

Often Dealership sells 100s vehicles and repairs over 1200 cars in a month. Why would a service department staff work hard in fetching more Google Reviews from service customers and the sales department enjoys the sales leads from Google Reviews? No way, right? Then how do you solve this tussle? Who would motivate service staff to do this? If you want a Google Review from a repair customer, only the service advisor has chemistry and the service advisor is so busy!

No one can solve this tussle, not even GM, Dealer principal, not OEM,  not service manager, not sales manager, not marketing manager, not OEM CSI vendor, not even 3rd party company, because technologies available for this area happened to be in no man’s land with the way dealerships intra-department relationships have been structured for over 50 years.  

Solution: After evaluating and building the CSI Booster platform for over 10 years, DealTimer came to the conclusion that this puzzle can not be solved unless disruptive technologies are built in such a way the dealerships would fall in love with it without any choice. DealTimer has such technologies, and it is a tough job without the cooperation of dealers’ principals giving full authority to DealTimer.

It is a catch-22 in fetching more Google Reviews:

No one can solve this tussle, not even GM, Dealer principal, not OEM,  not service manager, not sales manager, not marketing manager, not OEM CSI vendor, not even 3rd party company, because technologies available for this area happened to be in no man’s land with the way dealerships intra-department relationships have been structured for over 50 years.  

Solution: After evaluating and building the CSI Booster platform for over 10 years, DealTimer came to the conclusion that this puzzle can not be solved unless disruptive technologies are built in such a way the dealerships would fall in love with it without any choice. DealTimer has such technologies, and it is a tough job without the cooperation of dealers’ principals giving full authority to DealTimer.

It is a common perception that Google Reviews help in generating sales leads. It is totally a blunder in this assumption In the age of building self-driving car technology, it is ignorance to believe that Google is not smart enough to attribute Service Google reviews to the generation of Service Leads, Sales Google reviews are attributed to generate more sales leads, and so is with parts Google Reviews generating parts leads.

Solution: At present due to a lack of technology for reputation management in producing Google Reviews with the right content, dealerships are not capitalizing even 10% of the Google Reviews capability, and alternatively, Google has been selling pay-per-clicks and getting paid over $10K per month.  If the dealerships understand DealTimer’s capability, DealTimer can build an innovative Google Review solution for a group with at least 10 stores and drive organic lead generation for sales, service, and parts with mere Google Reviews in a 50-mile radius.

For decades, parts purchased customers were never solicited for Social Reviews, dealership feedback, or OEM surveys, as if the parts department is non-existent or treated like a step-child. It is very unfortunate because the Dealerships follow the vendor’s recommendations when it comes to technology usage for the operations.

Solution:  If you are part of a dealership group, DealTimer can provide Google Reviews-based parts marketing and parts lead generation business with organic content ofParts Google Reviews. Please contact DealTimer if you are interested in growing your Parts business online.

It is said that more than 80% of the Dealerships’ Google Business Profiles are not 100% accurate with all the fields filled with the right information, in order for Google to track and route the traffic to millions of customers searching online.

Solution: Dealership management needs educational support to learn more about digital marketing and be aware of the latest trends. If they give 100% control to the vendors, it is very difficult for vendors to deliver true marketing services, because it demands technology support the marketing companies do not have and technology vendors can not customize th technology to suit marketing vendor’s requirements. DealTimer offers custom technology solutions for marketing companies and groups only. 

Due to a lack of understanding and dedicated personnel in the automotive dealership, and also both the in-house marketing director and 3rd party marketing vendors are still learning on migrating from traditional old-school marketing programs to ultra-modern digital marketing and balancing the marketing budgets between old and new schools, obviously shifting the gear to boost the online presence for Service Parts Departments has taken a back seat.

Solution: It is a project by itself. Please contact DealTimer for support in this area. DealTimer can help in building service and parts business profile-driven reviews generating continuous service and parts leads.

Lots of Dealerships are confused between focusing on getting more Google Reviews or more Dealer Rater reviews, Yelp Reviews, or reviews from over 20+ social review sites!

Yes, Dealer Rater came up with the Reviews concept ahead, no doubt, but what percentage of online customers go to Dealer Rater vs Google? If we notice this difference, there is no further dilemma. After the Dealer Rater was purchased by Cars.com, this dilemma is no longer in choosing between Dealer Rater reviews vs Google Reviews.

Solution: If a dealership group is willing DealTimer can build a Review Based Website for a car dealership revolving around 1000s of Social reviews woven around inventory and generating sales leads, service leads, and parts leads. 

Does it mean OEM is wrong, if the OEM is forcing the dealer to choose one of 3 recommended reputation vendors?

It depends.  If the dealership has shown taking responsibility of producing too many Google Reviews, along with a few reviews on other social review platforms,  OEM do give choice for the dealerships to have their own preferred reputation vendor to follow up and fetch social reviews.  It is very important for the dealership to maintain Google Review ratings above 4.0 to 4.2  in order to enjoy the freedom from OEM in having their own reputation vendor.

The other alternative is, the dealerships can choose to have their own reputation vendor as the group has several brands and corporate-level marketing programs would prefer to have one reputation vendor for all brands in the group.

Solution: DealTimer has innovative technology specifically built for both Social Review Reputation and OEM CSI Booster solutions for all brands in a single dashboard,  saving 100 of hours of labor for each of the store locations for handling Google Reviews and OEM CSI scores in one screen.

This dilemma of who pays for reputation vendors came into place because of confusion.

Sometimes the reputation bill is paid by the Dealership’s in-house marketing director’s budget,  some times it is paid as part of the 3rd party marketing vendor’s monthly bill on behalf of the dealership,  some times the OEMs have become smart enough to pay a portion of the reputation bill as if it is an incentive to the dealership and possibly they could be deducting that portion from the dealership payments and often these deductions are classified in the most confusing ways documented in a length PDF files and more often the General Managers, Comptrollers, and Dealers principals receive detailed documents regarding deductions and often ignored to be read and find out if the OEM really paying for Reputation vendor, it is gimmick being plated by Reputation Vendor through OEM.

Unsolvable Solution: It is made so confusing way structured to loot the dealerships in both the reputation vendor selection process and reputation invoice payment process, it is impossible for busy dealership management to solve this puzzle for decades. Hence, they left it loose and vendors have feasted in enjoying the low-hanging fruit of reputation invoices paid even with poor results generated from reputation drive for decades. 

It is a common myth for most that the Dealer should have freedom in handling Reputation reviews and OEM only should bother about OEM Surveys filled by customers. This is not correct. OEM Reps have right to question on Google Reviews, even though the OEMs do not contribute directly to the bills from Reputation Vendors. If we observe carefully, OEMs are paying 100 times more money to Dealerships to keep the branding image, starting with millions of dollars for the building, equipment, marketing materials, OEM surveys, employing dozens of OEM paid management/Reps trying to support Dealership staff day-in and day-out. All these efforts from OEMs are there to keep the brand image high enough not to lose the customer to competing brands. Without this understanding often the busy dealership management feels that they are being nagged by OEM Reps.

Unsolvable Solution: It is very simple to answer. How many dealer principals lost their points simply because their OEM CSI Scores are poor years and the dealers lost 10-20 million dollars of investments because of poor CSI scores and poor Reputation? Due to a lack of analytical proof, dealers often ignore poor OEM CSI Scores and poor Google Reviews to the extent of losing the franchise point. On the other hand, the OEMs request dealer principals to maintain good CSI scores and Google Reviews to rake over the Franchise points with poor CSI scores. Does this answer the question the dilemma of why OEM reps are nagging the dealerships on poor CSI scores and poor Google Reviews? 

It is often for dealers to quickly check in DMS with customer information and if not found, they may classify the negative Google Reviews as fake reviews. This is not accurate.

It is common for dealers’ sales reps not to enter customer info into Sales CRM unless they see there is a potential in selling a vehicle. From this aspect, only 15 to 20 of the customer inquiries coming into the Sales Floor are entered into the sales CRM. Of these, only  3 to 5% end up purchasing vehicles and only those customers make it into the DMS sold deals.  In a similar fashion, only 15% of inquiries into service drives end up in closed repair orders. There are 1000s of customers who possibly may have frustrated experiences and they do not end up in the Sales CRM nor in the DMS system.

DealTimer’s Solution: DealTimer came up with a special CSI Booster solution that captures customer feelings before purchasing a vehicle and before coming to the service drive for repair.   Isn’t a common sense to see that if we can solve all unhappy customer scenarios before selling a vehicle, we end up selling more vehicles and bringing in more customers to service drive?

Understanding Google Review’s strengths takes about a 5-day seminar for marketing directors to grasp the power and initiate a plan around Google Review’s strategy to grow organically and boost the dealership presence in a 50-mile radius.

Why does Google’s market cap is about 2 trillion dollars, whereas IBM’s market cap is under 200 billion? Dealer’s failure of understanding how each Google Review is like a remote Tent-Sale point or expensive Billboard ADs rooting for a Dealership name in a 50-100 mile radius for FREE. If this truth is known to Marketing Director, Google Reviews are the cheapest marketing drives one should chase after. Unfortunately, dealers don’t have time to understand this, and traditional marketing companies managing marketing initiatives do not have the bandwidth to manage the reputation of dealerships.

DealTimer’s Solution: This is not a one-day task to learn and implement. This is an educational process the marketing managers should transform themselves into Digital space to strategize their future goals revolving around green marketing to survive in the EV revolution coming in this decade.

A negative Google Review posting indicates that the customer’s frustration reached the peak and the dealership has been ignoring customer feelings for a long time, especially if it is related to the service department.

Stage #1:  When a mistake or misunderstanding happens in sales or service drive, the employee did not catch it, and the customer may often try to give negative feedback to overnight follow-up.

Stage #2:   When the management fails to follow up on negative feedback given to the vendor, the upset customer goes to Google and gives negative feedback.  Who allowed this to happen?
Stage #3:

Customer gives feedback to OEM with poor CSI score. Even when that negative OEM survey is ignored by the management, the customer goes to post the frustration on Google and other social review sites.

Stage #4: A few customers go the extra mile to replicate Google Review onto many more sites with vengeance.

Stage #5: If the dealership management still does not contact the customer and solve the issue, the customer spreads poison to at least 10-20 potential customers in the 25-mile radius which hurt the dealership even more severely.

The customer has given a clear indication of his/her frustration and as it was overlooked by the management, hence negative Google Reviews.

DealTimer’s Solution: This is not a one-day task to learn and implement. This is an educational process the marketing managers should transform themselves into Digital space to strategize their future goals revolving around green marketing to survive in the EV revolution coming in this decade.

Like the old saying “Tell me about your friends, I will tell everything about you”, it is very much possible to inject or embed required keywords into Google Reviews and Google Review responses in a strategic way even Google can not figure this out, and turn Google to work for your dealership in presenting dealership Website in front of customers searching for those keywords in 10-50 mile radius.

DealTimer’s Solution: If a dealership group of 10 or more stores approaches DealTimer for this feature of organically boosting dealership SEO with Google Reviews,  it requires a special technology customized on top of DealTimer CSI system and support of 1-2 smart BDC reps to work on Dealtimer platform for 10-15 hours a week deliver this project of planting Google Review driven SEO that keeps bringing 10-20 sales leads and 30-50 new service appointments per month for FREE for life!

We recommend giving the management DealTimer technology tools to bring CSI and Reviews under control and win customer loyalty to boost the revenue and margins.

Similar to fixer-upper- home buyers buy trashed homes for 75% off the list price, fix it, and sell it back in the market for full a full price, there are seasoned dealers and GMs who can snatch CSI-Reviews-Margins trashed dealerships 75% of the market price and fix it and sell it back for $10-$40M more profits in a matter of 24-36 months. Where can you make this kind of money in the automotive industry?

Here are the following stages in which the dealer-fixer-uppers leverage their capability like the way they play a poker game in Los Vegas.

Stage #1:  Both OEM Reps are monitoring all the dealerships in the district with the best CSI scores, best profit margins, and the best team of management and also monitor the dealership’s bad Google Reviews, poor CSI scores, and poor profit margins in the district. That is the full-time job of OEM reps to keep on motivating the dealership management to stay on top of CSI and profit margins.

Stage #2:   When the management fails to follow up on bad Google Reviews, Social Reviews, Dealership reviews, and bad OEM surveys, it shows that the management is overwhelmed by the operations and fires being put off in the sales and service departments and do not have time for addressing negative CSI-Reviews issues and eventually, they end up losing CSI scores, lots of loyal customers built over decades and the profit margins will shrink to the point that the dealership is not able to sustain the operations.

Stage #3: When a dealership is in the downward cycle, the OEM reps keep on working with dealers to replace the management staff to bring back the dealership on track. After trying out a couple of times swapping the management, and if the dealership has persistent CSI problems unfixed, and margins are not improving, then the dealer was given a choice either to sell the dealership before too much damage occurs or give the franchise point to another dealer at a deeply discounted price.

Stage #4: When one dealer is going through a downward path, the OEM rep and fixer-upper kind of dealer in engaging in talking terms and see if the franchise point could be taken over at a deeply discounted price. in parallel to this effort, the dealership has the choice to engage a private party for buy-sale operations at a  better price than the OEM-bridged buy-sale deal.

Stage #5: The fixer-upper dealer who purchased the dealership for a fractional cost, employs his/her innovative ways to fix the dealership’s Reviews, CSI Scores, and profit margins to the point that the dealership is in the top tier in the district or region within 24 months.

Are you on the losing side or the gaining side of CSI-Reviews-Customers-Margins of the dealership?

 
DealTimer’s Solution: DealTimer can offer CSI boosting solutions to the dealer in CSI-Reviews-Margins downward path to arrest the sale of dealership points at a loss of $10M-50M  or assist the dealer of CSI-fixer-upper kind and boost the CSI scores, Google Reviews, bring back loyal customers again, and boost the profit margins above the pre-drain era of the dealership.

$nbsp;

There are several warnings to the management about the impending tsunami of getting fired or leaving at will due to hectic dealership operations not giving enough time to fix the Google Reviews, Dealership Reviews, bad CSI scores, losing loyal customers, and finally losing profit forcing not able to cover the expenses and hence valuations of dealership going down by $10M to $50M into the trash. There is no one to blame here, except the conditions on the table, and the ability to recover from the downward depends on several factors.

DealTimer’s Solution: If the GM or the service director is on the position of downward path of losing loyal customers with bad Google reviews, bad OEM surveys, etc, and getting fired from the management to boost the CSI and reviews, please contact DealTimer and designate one trustworthy advisor to spend about 5 hours a week to work with DealTimer and fix all the CSI issues and Google Reviews and bring back loyal customers and save yourself from the getting fired or looking for another job!

This is the time of building self-driving car technologies. A vehicle is smart enough to drive itself without meeting an accident on busy roads with all kinds of sensors ushering the vehicle to the destination by taking control of the steering wheel, brakes, and gas pedals into its hands.

DealTimer’s Solution: DealTimer is not a typical vendor selling a reputation for a monthly fee. DealTimer is an engineering partner to customize the solution and builds the CSI technology to address the root cause of the CSI problems! Please contact DealTimer and have a preliminary discussion.