Why We Built Pulse: A Private Survey Solution for Dealerships

When we set out to design Pulse, Widewail’s new private survey product for car dealerships, our mission was clear: to make progress toward our vision of creating trust between dealerships and the communities they serve by providing actionable, structured, customer feedback. All without frustrating their customers or overloading their teams. But to get there, we had to address a core issue dealerships face every day.

The Problem: Too Much Noise, Too Little Clarity

Your OEM sends surveys. Your review platform fires off another. Maybe your CRM tool nudges you to tack on another customer outreach. And yet, amidst all this data collection, a single, pressing question lingers:

"Do I actually have the data I need to make better decisions?"

It’s 2025, and dealerships are running flat out. Incentives are back, negotiations are part of the sale once again, and your team is navigating the complexities of EVs, hybrids, and ICE models—all under the weight of soaring customer expectations. Customer feedback is more critical than ever, but every touchpoint feels like walking a tightrope. Ask too much, and you’ll push your customers away. Ask too little, and you’re stuck making guesses instead of informed decisions.

Here’s the harsh reality:

Without precise, structured feedback, you risk costly mistakes—whether it’s doubling down on the wrong investments or overlooking key operational fixes. Relying on fragmented tools like scattered email surveys, basic CRM tools, or clunky SMS links only adds to the chaos. These systems frustrate your customers and leave you buried in disjointed data, struggling to extract anything meaningful.

To put it simply:

• You need surveys that customers actually want to answer.
• You need insights that cut through the noise—sharp, actionable, and immediate.
• And you need solutions that work seamlessly without adding to your already stretched-thin team’s workload.

The current tools just aren’t built for the complexity and speed of dealership life. They’re disconnected, cumbersome, and ultimately, ineffective.

We built Pulse to meet the demands of today.

The Vision: From Voice of the Customer to Data-Driven Action

Pulse didn’t come from a brainstorming session in isolation. It was born from feedback from OEM clients and insights from over 10,000,000 reviews analyzed through Widewail’s AI platform. One dealer’s request summed it up perfectly: “When are you getting into the survey game? We need the Widewail secret sauce here, too.”

Widewail’s approach has always been about creating trust between businesses and their communities. With Pulse, we took that philosophy a step further. By analyzing public reviews, we identify patterns and pinpoint potential areas of improvement—from communication breakdowns to missed opportunities in service transparency. Pulse takes those insights and enables dealerships to dive deeper through targeted, private surveys.

With a taxonomy of 27 key topics distilled through advanced natural language processing, dealerships can ask the right questions and get reporting that ties back to those important topics. Communication issues? Wait times? Transparency? Pulse helps dealers zero in on their biggest challenges, ensuring every survey is as effective and concise as possible.

Why Existing Survey Tools Fall Short

The private survey market isn’t new, but most tools are standalone solutions. They don’t integrate with review platforms, which leads to one of the most common dealership frustrations: over-surveying customers. Bombarded with requests from multiple sources, customers quickly become fatigued, leading to lower response rates and, ironically, less actionable feedback.

Widewail’s product solves this problem. Pulse works in tandem with our review solution, Invite, to ensure that survey sends are coordinated and thoughtful. By strategically timing and segmenting outreach, dealerships can avoid survey collisions and maintain a seamless customer experience. For example, if a review request is sent immediately after a transaction, Pulse can delay a private survey by sending it a handful of days or a week later. Or perhaps you’d like to deliver a Pulse survey to 25% of your sales customers, asking the majority to leave a review - no problem.

This partnership between tools provides peace of mind to our clients. They can trust that their feedback strategy is streamlined and customer-centric, allowing them to focus on the insights rather than the logistics. With Widewail, oversurveying becomes a thing of the past.

What Makes Pulse Different?

We also focused on several key aspects of the product to directly address dealers' surveying needs, including:

Pulse is unlike anything else on the market. It blends private surveys with public reviews to create a unified feedback ecosystem. Here’s what sets it apart:

1. Integrated Insights. Pulse doesn’t operate in a silo. By combining public and private feedback on a single platform, we provide a complete picture of customer sentiment. This integrated approach ensures insights from public reviews reinforce or challenge findings from private surveys, leading to more confident decision-making.
   With Pulse, dealerships can leverage a consistent taxonomy of 27 customer experience topics, ensuring continuity between public and private feedback. For example, if reviews highlight a communication problem, Pulse enables dealerships to send targeted surveys focusing on communication to dig deeper and identify specific solutions.
2. Streamlined Customer Experience. Over-surveying is a major concern, and Pulse tackles this head-on. With tools to coordinate public and private survey outreach, dealerships can avoid customer fatigue while maintaining statistically significant data. By splitting customer bases—for instance, 30% receiving a survey and 70% a review request—or strategically timing outreach, Pulse ensures a seamless customer experience. This coordination eliminates the collisions and inconsistencies seen with standalone tools, giving dealerships the confidence that every customer interaction is purposeful and non-intrusive.
3. Research-Backed Questions. Dealerships don’t need to be survey experts—that’s our job. Pulse offers a ready-to-go library of 65 questions, each vetted to produce valid and unbiased survey results.
4. Automation and AI-Powered Insights Pulse automates survey delivery based on key lifecycle triggers, such as after a purchase or service appointment. Surveys are delivered via SMS for higher response rates, with email as a backup. Combined with Widewail’s Voice of the Customer AI Analytics, this ensures every piece of feedback is analyzed, contextualized, and actionable. Whether addressing transparency, communication, or wait times, dealerships gain the insights they need to make impactful decisions.

The Most Dangerous Phrase in Business

"I think."

It’s a phrase we hear too often, and it costs businesses dearly. "I think our customers care most about wait times." "I think they’ll appreciate valet service." These assumptions lead to wasted resources and missed opportunities. 

Pulse transforms these guesses into data-driven certainty. 

By combining public feedback with targeted private surveys, dealerships can uncover actionable insights that inform everything from staffing and training to capital investments.

The Future of Feedback

Pulse is more than a survey tool. It’s a strategy for turning fragmented feedback into actionable insights, empowering dealerships to exceed customer expectations in an increasingly competitive market. 

With Pulse, the days of guesswork are over. Instead, dealerships can confidently move forward, backed by data that reveals exactly what their customers need.

We are unveiling Pulse at NADA 2025. We will be running demos at Booth #8745. 

Learn more about Pulse.