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.
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:
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.
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.
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.
We also focused on several key aspects of the product to directly address dealers' surveying needs, including:
| The Ask | How This Shows Up (Day in the Life) |
What We Built |
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"We need feedback we can act on." |
OEM survey results are delayed and review insights leave an opportunity for more pointed questions. A manager is left staring at a report saying "communication issues" with no specifics on where or how to improve. |
Targeted Private Surveys: Pulse helps dealerships dig into specific areas (e.g., communication issues) with surveys focused on identifying where in the business the problem occurs and what are the nuances of the problem that provide management a clear roadmap. |
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“Our customers already get a lot of requests for feedback” |
Customers complain about receiving multiple survey requests from different systems (OEM, review platform) in a single day. This frustration leads to poor response rates, skewed data, and risks customers looking elsewhere next time. |
Coordinated Outreach: Pulse integrates with review platforms to strategically time surveys, avoiding over-surveying and ensuring a smooth customer experience. |
| "We don't have the time or expertise to manage surveys" |
The service manager wastes hours trying to design and send surveys, often leading to clunky language or poorly timed outreach that annoys customers and generates little actionable data. |
Automated Systems with Research-Backed Questions: Pulse comes with proven survey questions built in. The survey-sending process is automated via Widewail Campaigns, existing DMS integrations, and customer event triggers. This ensures that the right customer gets the right survey at the right time, completely hands off for the dealer day-to-day. |
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“Can you respond to surveys, too?” |
A customer leaves negative feedback in a survey, and the dealership has no way, or no efficient way, to respond directly, missing an opportunity to address the issue or recover the relationship. |
Response Capabilities: Pulse includes tools and services provided by the Widewail team for dealerships to directly respond to survey feedback, enabling swift resolutions, improving customer satisfaction, and building trust through proactive engagement. |
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:
"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.
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.