Discover how surveys and reviews differ in capturing customer feedback, helping dealerships improve service and sales strategies.
Understanding customer sentiment is essential for building trust and loyalty in the automotive industry.
Two key tools for gathering this feedback—online reviews and customer surveys—both offer valuable insights, but each serves a different purpose.
In this article, we’ll explore how these feedback methods can work together to boost your dealership’s reputation and performance.
Let’s go over some of the key differences between the format and uses of surveys and reviews in the automotive industry.
Reviews: Open-ended feedback, often unsolicited, where customers share their experiences publicly. Reviews generate social proof, building trust in your dealership.
Surveys: Structured feedback tailored to specific interactions, allowing for targeted insights on the car-buying, service, or overall dealership experience.
Reviews: Publicly posted on third-party sites like Google, Yelp, or DealerRater. While reviews can be spontaneous, they often stem from extreme experiences (positive or negative).
Surveys: Surveys are proactively sent out by your dealership after a purchase or service, gathering more specific and actionable feedback on customer interactions.
Reviews: Reviews involve broad and less structured feedback and are often focused on overall impressions or isolated experiences, making them a great place for you to engage with your customers directly.
Example: "I enjoyed my experience at ABC Dealership! I found the perfect car for me and my family and will definitely be telling my friends to come here when they are looking to buy!"
Surveys: A well-constructed survey will elicit highly detailed feedback focusing on specific areas such as vehicle quality, dealership service, or the financing process. They will avoid any bias to give you actionable and measurable insights into the customer experience offered at your dealership.
Example: "The servicing process went very smoothly. Tim communicated which services needed to be completed today and was very upfront about wait times. He also walked me through pricing at the end of servicing. Thank you ABC Dealership for keeping my car in top shape!"
Reviews: While you can control request reviews, you have no control over what kind of feedback a review might elicit. Feedback is spontaneous and varies because it reflects the general sentiment of the customer. This makes reviews a great way to receive an unbiased look at the general impression of your business.
Surveys: Survey questions provide a structured way to gather feedback, allowing your business to target specific aspects of the customer experience. However, survey design plays a critical role in ensuring that the feedback you receive is truly representative. Carefully drafting questions to avoid leading language or biased phrasing is essential to maintain objectivity and gather accurate, actionable data.
For instance, instead of asking, “How excellent was your service experience?” a more neutral approach like, “How would you rate your service experience on a scale from 1-10?” encourages customers to share a broader range of honest opinions, giving your dealership clearer insights into areas for improvement.
Need some guidance on what kind of questions to ask? Check out 10 examples of auto service survey questions.
Reviews: Customer reviews reflect sentiments that examine the overall brand reputation as perceived by the public. These sentiments reveal insights into recurring customer issues and the impact of online presence on customer decisions. Ratings and how often you engage with your customers via reviews will inform your reputation. When a client leaves a negative review for your business, a transparent and solution-based response will demonstrate your commitment to customer satisfaction and build credibility with potential clientele.
Surveys: Surveys offer structured insights about specific categories of automotive interactions. Some categorizations that you could focus on in your surveys include:
Reviews: Sentiment analysis, a branch of Natural Language Processing (NLP)
that evaluates text to determine the emotional tone, can be applied to reviews to understand the general satisfaction of your clientele and identify potential reputation threats before they escalate.
You can also apply sentiment analysis to your market research by tracking sentiment around industry trends and product/service satisfaction. Sentiment analysis of reviews may miss nuances due to their unstructured text processing, which is why it’s important to read every review carefully before responding.
While AI tools boost efficiency, it’s strongly advised to include a final step of human review and approval.
Surveys: The detailed nature of surveys allows for direct measurement of
satisfaction metrics like CSAT (Customer Satisfaction Score), CES (Customer Effort Score), or NPS (Net Promoter Score). Let’s go over an example automotive survey question for each metric.
Reviews: Reviews highlight broader trends in your brand reputation and marketing strategies, but may require further detailed analysis to extract actionable data. You can identify recurring themes in your company’s reputation, service quality, and credibility which you can then use to make operational improvements and customer communication adjustments.
Example: Frequent negative reviews about staff behavior such as, “service advisor was unprofessional” signals a need for further customer service training.
Surveys: The specified and customized abilities of surveys provide actionable insights for distinct aspects of categories such as service, purchase, or product. With surveys, you can track the customer journey across different touchpoints (e.g. shopping process, finance, maintenance) and can filter segmentation-based insights by categories like demographics, location, or product type. You can use the above-mentioned metrics (NPS, CSAT, CES) to identify different areas for improvement.
Example: A declining NPS score indicates a drop in customer loyalty and signals the need for reputation management strengthening.
Surveys, which can be sent out to customers via text or email after customers interact with your dealership, are a powerful tool for gathering precise, actionable data. Here are the unique advantages of surveys:
While surveys provide detailed back-end insights for your dealership, Google Reviews, DealerRater, Cars.com, and similar platforms provide a broader, public-facing view of customer sentiment that can inform the decisions of potential clients. Here are their standout benefits:
Together, reviews and surveys create a comprehensive picture of your business reputation:
Reputation management isn’t about choosing between automotive customer surveys and online reviews—it’s about leveraging both effectively.
By integrating these tools into your reputation management strategy, your dealership can enhance customer satisfaction while building a strong online presence that drives trust and loyalty.
Check out some examples of survey questions to ask your automotive customers here.
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