If you've been managing your dealership's reputation, you know the stakes. Online reviews, star ratings, and social media mentions directly impact your showroom traffic and sales. This is because sales doesn't start the moment your buyers walk into the showroom. It starts when they start googling the best car dealers near them and checking out reviews.
Most dealerships are only reactive to customer feedback. If a customer has a bad experience with the dealership, they leave a negative review online, and then the dealers start fixing it. By that time, the damage is done, and there's a negative remark online that you cannot erase.
Shift from being reactive to being proactive. This is where customer satisfaction (CSAT) surveys act as strong pillars boosting your reputation management strategy. With CSAT surveys for car dealers , you can be proactive and find out their pain points, mixed experiences, or even the slightest discomfort your buyers face, way before they vent them in online reviews.
What is online reputation management?
Managing how people perceive your brand online is called online reputation management. To maintain a good reputation, you need to check and respond to reviews, feedback, analyze sentiment, social mentions, and keep a track of your complete online presence.
CSAT surveys can change the way you manage your reputation
CSAT surveys for customer support are like an early warning. These short and easy to answer questionnaires, sent right after a sale or a service visit, give customers a private space to share honest feedback.
If you plan the timing well, then you can catch dissatisfaction within hours or days without letting it blow up into a massive negative review. For example, a buyer who is unhappy with paperwork delays may vent to you directly through a survey instead of posting a bad review on your online profile.
So, this becomes an opportunity to fix the issue right then and there, preventing you having to implement damage control strategies. On the other hand, satisfied buyers become your prime candidates, giving great reviews and recommending you to their friends and family with a gentle nudge from your end.
But for all of this to happen, you have to be discoverable online, and here's how you can achieve that.
Fill in every part of your Google profile. Make sure you claim your business and have the right contact phone numbers and addresses. Keep posting weekly updates about new cars on your lot or other special services. If you have answers from your surveys where buyers told you what made them choose you, use them to your benefit in your posts.
If you have a website, use local keywords to create simple pages focusing on your neighborhood areas. Use your area's name along with the models available to favor local SEO.
If you get positive customer feedback in private, give the customer a slight nudge to post a review on your online profile. You can do this simply by following up your previous CSAT survey questionnaire with an email saying, "We're happy to hear that you enjoyed the experience. Please help us by rating us on our profile page" and adding a link to your profile.
Stay away from using made-up customers and sales pictures. This will only be more harmful for your reputation, and it will take you years to recover from the damage this does to your business. Even if you have only one or two pictures, that's worth more than the made-up pictures, so stick to what's true. If possible, you can try getting a quick short video of the happy customer and the vehicle and tag them on social media for more credibility and boost.
Find out what questions your buyers frequently ask and answer them on your website so they don't have to make a huge effort to find simple information. When they walk in, they'll have fewer questions and more confidence.
Now that you're discoverable online and show up when people search for a car dealer near them, you have to start thinking about managing your online reputation proactively.
Send out a new service feedback form and set up instant alerts for your surveys with low star ratings. Reach out to your customers who give you low scores. It works best when you let your sales manager deal with sales-related concerns and your service manager deal with service-related concerns. Nothing speaks louder and conveys the care you have more than a call within 24 hours of the survey response. This will stop them from ranting online and leaving a bad remark on your dealership showroom.
Automatically send emails to customers who give you a good rating asking them to share it on review sites, Google, or even on social media. The best thing about automating this process is that it saves time and keeps your team focused on critical areas that need attention.
When you send a car service feedback survey, make sure to pay attention to the comments. Words like "wait time," "unclear," "unsatisfied," "rude," and "slow" could mean there's dissatisfaction. Zoho Survey displays a word cloud that lets you quickly and easily find out the most-used words. Use this information to send an email or call them based on the intensity of the comment and give them a solution before it blows up.
Keep a note of what your customers prefer or appreciate most in your surveys. For example, comments like "friendly staff," "quick service," and "instant solutions" will not only encourage your staff but keep them looking for specific areas that can be improved.
If you use Zoho Survey, you can easily analyze the sentiments in your survey responses and immediately look for the best course of action instead of manually reading them all and trying to make your conclusions.
Final words
While we all know that sales is important, the actual goal is keeping your customers happy and being aware that sales starts even before they come to your dealership showroom. A great survey tool like Zoho Survey lets you proactively send feedback questionnaires for every stage of the customer journey and helps you with detailed reports.
You can frame questions based on your requirements or simply drag and drop questions from question banks. If you're keen on maintaining your brand's look and feel, then build the entire survey to match your custom branding.
The advanced logic and branching lets you display only relevant questions based on your respondents' previous answers.
You can distribute your customer satisfaction surveys on different channels, including social media, website embeds or pop-ups, SMS links, and more. If you're looking to manage your reputation proactively, then get started with Zoho Survey right now.