Putting out the fires
As most of you know, in parallel to my role at ICDP, I have the pleasure (and occasional pain) of leading an emerging dealer group on behalf of one of our member companies, Çetaş Otomotiv, from Turkey. That gives me an opportunity to experience life at the sharp end rather than observe from a distance, and one of the things that has unfortunately been occupying my time is dealing with some negative customer reviews.
In general, the team at Auto West London do a great job – evidenced by the many five star reviews calling out many of the staff by name for their helpfulness, professionalism, product knowledge and diligence. These are all naturally generated with no incentives or pleadings to secure the coveted high ratings from customers. That’s great and we’ll continue to celebrate those successes. However, we also get the occasional one star review, with rarely anything in between. The effect is significant as most potential customers tend to focus on the overall score, and even a few ones amongst a host of fives will pull the score down by a couple decimal points.
The issue goes beyond the reaction of potential customers, as manufacturers also place great score by customer satisfaction, and our OEM partner Omoda Jaecoo has appointed Reputation to provide feedback across their UK network. Like other consolidators of their type, they take the scores from multiple sources including manufacturer surveys, Google, Facebook and Autotrader and produce an overall score that influences the variable margin that a dealer gets if they do not pass a certain threshold. At one level, the process is helpful because I get immediate alerts when a customer leaves a review, and human nature being what it is, I focus on any that come through that are negative.
The consolidation process itself presents a problem, particularly to a young business like ourselves, as there is a risk in my view that the survey process can actually introduce a negative element into the closing stages of what has otherwise been a really great customer experience. How many surveys of one type or another can you realistically ask a customer to complete? We have QR codes for the Google review in the dealership and advise customers that they will get a survey form – but is it reasonable to ask them to also do Facebook and others? That smacks of desperation to me, so the response rates are influenced by this.
That then takes us to the behaviour of customers themselves. We all love our customers. Obviously. But some of those who leave reviews – and in my experience are more likely to leave reviews in multiple places, all of which get equal weighting in our overall score – are not customers. Some – two this week – do not live in this country, have never been to our dealership and probably wouldn’t recognise one of our cars if it ran them over in the street. They are scammers looking for us to call a foreign WhatsApp number and pay a ransom to remove the review. They understand how important reviews are to retail businesses. We are obviously working with Google to get the reviews removed as they are so clearly malicious, but in the meantime they stand and our overall score that prospective customers are looking at is dented for a while.
We also have prospective customers who we have dealt with but in the end did not sell a car to, but they then leave a negative review. One example presented themselves to us as a retail customer, then decided to buy through his business and arrange his own finance. In the process, the deal spilled over into the following month by which time the manufacturer deals had changed, so our final offer to him looked quite different to the original retail deal discussed and he did not buy. He did however leave three one star reviews on different platforms. When we contacted him suggesting that he had not described the facts fully and fairly, he asked for an additional £1,000 discount on his car to remove the reviews which we declined, so all three reviews stand.
We are obviously focusing on prevention rather than cure, with staff training and a great AI-based call recording system from StackCX which records and analyses all calls, as well as updating the CRM system and more. What frustrates me is that we end up putting in too much time to fighting the fires that in half the cases do not represent true experiences in order to keep our scores up, and our bonuses in place.
This where the worlds of ICDP and the Auto West London merge and reap dividends. ICDP has always been somewhat sceptical of the value of customer surveys and CSI related bonuses as they end up being played by the dealer at the expense of the customer. What being a dealer has taught me, is that two can play at that game, and sometimes it is the customer (or scammer) who is playing the game at the expense of the dealer. In the meantime, I’ll keep my fire extinguisher at the ready…