Richmond is the capital of Virginia and one of the most populated cities in the state. Located on the James River, the city holds historical significance and currently is a thriving center for culture and art.
Richmond also has a strong connection to the automotive industry. James Kline was the first automobile manufacturer in Richmond, producing steam-powered “Kline Kars” from 1911 to 1923. In total, Kline produced around 2,800 vehicles in Richmond before the industry was taken over by big names such as Ford Motors.
Across the street from the Kline factory was the Norfolk Fairgrounds track, where in 1907, the first race took place and was continued annually at the Richmond State Fair. Additionally, Richmond hosted its first NASCAR race in 1953 at what is now known as the Richmond International Raceway.
Richmond’s automotive history has yielded a competitive automotive dealer industry today. In Richmond, dealerships showcase strong review response rates, high Google star ratings, and significant review volume. To earn the best reputation in Richmond, dealers must provide top-notch service while activating the voices of their happy customers.
Using the Automotive Reputation Index, which ranks dealers by volume, rating, and response rate, we’ve identified the Richmond dealerships with the best online reputations.
McGeorge Toyota secures the #1 ranked dealer in Richmond, VA, with an overall health score of 78. It just barely beats the #2 ranked dealer, Crown Acura Richmond, which earned a health score of 77. While these dealers are neck and neck in most metrics analyzed, McGeorge Toyota’s relative lifetime review volume is significantly higher, allowing it to secure the top spot.
The Whitten Brothers rank #6 on the list. It has one of the lowest monthly review volumes of dealers in Richmond. This dealer should focus on soliciting reviews from every customer interaction to increase its monthly review volume.
In ninth place is Richmond Ford Lincoln. This dealer has a lot of room for improvement in the realm of review response, with a response rate of just 2%. Responding to every review is essential to a dealer's online reputation, and Richmond Ford Lincoln will remain suppressed in the rankings unless it improves in this area. The dealer would benefit from partnering with a reputation monitoring service like Widewail to manage its review response strategy.
Crown Acura Richmond earns the #1 spot in the top luxury dealers ranking. This dealer exhibits a nearly perfect review response rate of 99%, substantial monthly review volume and an above-average Google star rating of 4.71 stars.
Ranking in third place, Audi Richmond could effortlessly skyrocket to the top of the chart if it improved its low review response rate of 39%. It could also benefit from consistently responding to all its reviews moving forward.
Mercedes-Benz of Richmond also has a low review response rate of only 5%. This dealer should invest in customer engagement through a more stable review response strategy to increase its fifth-place ranking.
Turning to non-luxury dealers, McGeorge Toyota again finds itself in the top spot. This dealer has set a high standard for online reputation in Richmond, with a high lifetime review volume and response rate of 97%.
Crown MINI of Richmond comes in third place, even with the lowest lifetime review volume of the non-luxury dealers. However, if it can maintain its high monthly review volume, its lifetime review volume will naturally improve over time, helping this dealer rise in the rankings.
*Note from the editor. The Automotive Reputation Index offers substantial coverage of the nation’s dealerships, but it’s still growing. If your dealership is not yet listed on the Index and you’d like to add it, submit your information and we will add it during a regularly scheduled update, roughly once per month.
Widewail's rankings are based on the Widewail Automotive Reputation Index. Explore the full dataset:
Ranking Methodology
To rank these dealerships fairly, we chose a method that takes into account the fact that dealerships on our list receive a wide range of monthly review volume, in part due to varying levels of opportunity. For example, luxury brands simply can never sell as many cars as non-luxury brands, the price point limiting a luxury dealership's market.
To compare two dealerships with very different review volumes directly wouldn’t be fair. A dealer with two 5-star reviews doesn’t necessarily deserve to be ranked higher than a dealer with 200 reviews and a 4.5-star rating. With few reviews, the former doesn’t offer enough data for us to use to understand its performance. However, we couldn’t just ignore locations with very few reviews, as that would introduce bias into our rankings.
To solve this, we used "adjusted ratings" in our calculation of dealership ranking. In essence, "adjusted rating" is a dealership's star rating that takes into account how its review volume compares to that of other dealerships in that area. We calculated adjusted ratings by using a technique called additive smoothing which we explain below.
Additive Smoothing
The approach we’ve used is a form of what’s called “additive smoothing.” This process allows for an unbiased way to rank two otherwise unequal dealerships. At its core, additive smoothing levels the playing field by artificially increasing the number of reviews each dealership has by adding the same number of reviews of each star rating to every dealership.
Customer Engagement
Additionally, we take into account the percentage of reviews that a dealership has responded to in our calculation of ranking, as Widewail strongly believes that review response is indicative of a strong reputation strategy.
Activity
The last component revolves around how much review volume a dealership receives, which can be broken down into two parts - their lifetime volume and average monthly volume. Lifetime volume can be thought of as a popularity metric. It’s an important metric and one of the first numbers that a potential customer will see when they start looking at reviews. The second, average monthly review volume, is representative of how active the dealership currently is. We can think of it as follows, lifetime volume captures a historical view of the dealership whereas average volume gives insight into the current status. The final component for the volume metrics is to scale them so there is a more meaningful comparison. To do this we use what is known as min-max scaling. First, we group dealerships by their respective city and then find the dealership with the most volume and least volume. Then for each dealer in the group, we subtract the lowest volume and divide by the difference between the highest and lowest volume. The formula for this can be seen below.
x' = x - min(x)max(x) - min(x)
The main advantages of this approach are that all the volume metrics can be mapped to a value between 0 and 1 and the relative difference between dealership volumes can still be preserved.
Below we see an example of this where we have 9 dealerships with differing lifetime volumes, which we then scale. Notice that the relative distance between the actual volumes and the scaled versions is the same.
Below we have an example of ten dealerships, their review volume, and the adjusted relative volume. We can calculate the relative volume by sorting the dealers by review volume and determining the percentage of dealers that have fewer reviews. Here we see that dealer D had the most reviews and so they get a score of 1.
|
Lifetime Volume |
Scaled Volume |
|
4619 |
1 |
|
4065 |
0.88 |
|
3922 |
0.85 |
|
1783 |
0.38 |
|
1001 |
0.21 |
|
810 |
0.17 |
|
164 |
0.03 |
|
101 |
0.02 |
|
22 |
0 |
The Ranking Formula
(adjusted rating / 5) * 0.3 + (response rate) * 0.3 + (lifetime volume) * 0.15 + (avg monthly volume) * 0.25
Weighting Rational
We chose to weigh each feature as follows: adjusted rating accounts for 30% of the overall score, response rate also accounts for 30%, and review volume is 40%, which is further broken down into lifetime volume (15%) and average monthly volume (25%).
Weight selection is based on Widewail’s depth of expertise in the industry and we believe is a fair representation of what should be considered a standout reputation.
We’ve broken the weighs into three categories:
Activity (40%)
We believe the amount of review activity is the most important indicator of reputation health for a business, and is a leading driver of local search rankings. We’ve broken this category into two components: lifetime volume (15%) and frequency (25%). Lifetime volume is our “popularity” metric.
Engagement (30%)
Engaging with customers by responding to reviews is a key component of a healthy reputation.
Quality (30%)
The rating has a substantial impact on if a business shows up in local search and if that business is entered into a prospect’s consideration set. Rating is a key identifier of business health.
Calculation Details
If a company has an adjusted rating of 4.2, responds to 10% of their reviews and has an adjusted lifetime volume of 0.90 in their city and 0.87 for their scaled average monthly review volume, then we would calculate their overall rating as follows
(4.2 / 5) * 0.3 + (0.1)*0.3 + (0.9)*0.15 + (0.87)*0.25 = 0.252 + 0.03 + 0.135 + 0.2175 = 0.6345 * 100 = 63.45
Note: Since response rate accounts for 30% of the overall ranking, if a dealer doesn’t respond to any reviews that automatically caps the max value they can receive to 70.