What do you do when a customer blogs about their bad experience at your dealer?

Well, it happened again.  Another panicked general manager called me to report that a disgruntled customer had blogged their story about a mishandled service experience. The extremely negative post had been indexed in Google, scoring in the top 5 position of page 1 of a search on the dealership’s own name as the searched keyword phrase.

It isn’t the first time I’ve been called to the phone to hear appeals for help; "fix it fast" to "get it off of there" and "what could I do to get rid of this?" I’ve been building dealership websites for 11 years, so my clients usually make the call to me when they are on the receiving end of customer complaint blog posting. For a better term, let’s coin a name for this experience – "Flogging".

What can a dealer do if they have been flogged by a customer?

It’s hard to quantify the actual damages to your dealers business, but there definitely has to be a negative impact. In every single dealership site that we manage, the searches made using the dealership’s name are consistently the highest percentage searched keyword.  So the exposure is certainly there and a dealer’s discomfort is justified.

Whether justified or not, true or an outright fabrication, negative blogging or "flogging" by customers is a powerful way for an unhappy customer to do some real damage to your dealers online and offline business. I’ve seen customers published negative blogging stemming from experiences ranging from a used car sale where the tires were supposed to have been switched prior to delivery, to a new car price that was quoted one way as a phone up, and wasn’t available for that price when the customer arrived, to a press releases from Consumer Affairs about a dealer groups indictment and fine.

My advice to our clients has generally been the same.  First evaluate whether or not elements in the post are utterly false in which case an attorney’s letter might be in order.  More commonly though I advise dealers to swallow their pride and actively do whatever it takes to resolve the issue with the customer while asking for a retraction or positive update in the blog.

At one such dealership, on our advice, the dealer principal gave the customer his cell phone number and personally resolved the issue to the customer’s satisfaction and asked the customer/blogger to post how the dealer rectified the problem. This turned the negative blog posting into a positive testimonial for the dealer.

What if the customers’ issues are not solvable?  In those instances I think a viable tactic would be to participate on the blog and report what preventative measures and changes in policy and procedure resulted from the experience. This can show that you the dealer are sincerely concerned about the consumer and have taken the measures to prevent this from happening in the future.

In any case, shouldn’t a dealer try any means possible to participate and have a voice in the situation?  To me, silence or non-recognition is the most damaging tactic. I think the dealer should do their best to participate so that both sides of the story is viewed.

Getting flogged by a customer can have a powerful negative impact to your dealership.  It certainly should be a topic of discussion among dealership management teams and should be covered in personnel training.  In this recent Internet phenomenon your customers are empowered by the capability to flog you.

All dealership employees should understand that their customer service performance, or lack thereof, could become the catalyst for a powerful negative blog post. Instead of factoring into a CSI from an individual bad questionnaire, a single angry customer can now compound their opinion to thousands of your customers who have searched your most common search – your name.

Guest Post by Jeff Bonnell | Principal of MJM Internet, LLC

I want to thank Mr. Jeff Bonnell for his participation and for writing about such a concerning subject.

There is something that I personally do to help monitor what consumers could be writing or “Flogging” about our dealer. I put together a short step by step video on how you too can monitor possible flogging by setting up an RSS import using Google Blog Search and Google Reader.

Online Dealer Reputation Management How To Video

Online Dealer Reputation Management
 

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Is Video an effective tool for your dealers online marketing?

Video seems to be all the hype, BUT for selling vehicles, I’m not sure where and if fits into the landscape for dealers. With sites like HotSwap.com and others on the horizon, maybe we’ll find out soon enough.

Until then, will dealers be willing to spend the extra effort and money it takes to produce videos of their inventory (I’m not referring to the cheesy photo stitched videos)? Most dealers are still struggling to get decent photos of your inventory and now we’re throwing videos in the equation!

How can a video walk around of a car be any better then several pictures? Photos are usually less grainy, larger in size and load faster. I can merchandise a vehicle with the right photos with a detailed description as well if not BETTER then using video and do it in ¼ the time it takes to shoot a video. I have dabbled into inventory videos and still do with particular vehicles. The time it takes to do it right is consuming.

Someone had commented on a TechCrunch posting..

“Do videos help sell cars? Maybe if your car is not a commodity, like a highly modified 800 hp Z06 Corvette that I saw listed on ebay a couple of months ago. Yes that you might want to watch the video to see how the car pulls etc. But I won’t be going to a site like that to watch a 10 min video grainy video of a regular civic”.

I’m going to agree with this commenter. When I do video a car, it’s usually a premium high-line or performance vehicle. Not only do I record a full walk-around but I have gone as far to include motor and exhaust sound bytes as well. This brings some interesting and positive feedback from the eBay community and shoppers.

Can videos of your inventory increase conversion on your dealer website?

During a Cars.com webinare interview with Mike Lavezzi of Pacific Honda, Mike tracked an adverse effect in conversion.

“I tried the videos, and I tried expanding the amount of information online, and I didn’t notice much of a difference. In fact, I actually found video to have an adverse effect at times. Customers would notice something that tuned them off about the vehicle. We stopped doing videos, and things started turning back around.”

Now that’s an interesting statement and one that I personally have a few questions about.

1. Were you using actual video footage or photo stitched videos?
2. Did you have a 10 second intro commercial before each video?
3. How was the quality of your videos and were you using a text to speech voice over?
4. What amount of information were you “expanding” with your videos?

Mike..if you happen to read this, we would love to hear from you!

Another avenue to consider with video is your major search engines allowing videos to show up in keyword search results (mostly in Beta at the moment). This could be a huge factor to consider as search engines continue to have an impact on your automotive dealer online marketing efforts.

Sean Bradley of Dealer Synergy really pushed the envelope with his article in Digital Dealer and is a huge advocate of Video Search, stating..

“The latest multi-media/video trend is video Internet marketing or Internet 2.0. Video search is the foundation for the next Internet evolution.”

Uploading your inventory videos and dealer commercials to YouTube, Google Video and other online video hosting websites could benefit in terms of branding, local market awareness and driving traffic to your dealer website. You can also make use of these videos on you dealer blog, Myspace page or other micro sites as well.

With all of this evident, it still comes down to time and money it takes to produce your dealer and inventory videos. Will or does the ROI makes sense?

How many of you are currently using video for showcasing their inventory?

Do you think video will have a huge impact on how we market our inventory online in the near future?

We would love to hear your feedback!

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