Today’s REV is a special edition.
A little behind the scenes. When initially building our database of 1.6 million reviews (and will be roughly doubling next month) this summer we wanted to put together what we found in three formats.
- Automotive Reputation Index: The full dataset of 16k dealers with key reputation metrics available in an online spreadsheet-like interface, giving the industry transparent access to a flexible and comprehensive dataset.
- The REV Newsletter: We do the research to find interesting angles in the Index and send them out in a short format every 3 weeks.
- Industry Reports: The reports are the real substance—detailed analysis of review data and topic and sentiment trends in reviews, analyzed at an industry-wide scale.
And today, we launch our first report, the 2023 Voice of the Customer Report.
It’s 59 pages.
We topic- and sentiment-tagged 800,000 dealership reviews from 2023, breaking the data into 27 topics.
This level of topic analysis is not available in the Index.
Insights from the report will make it into future REV articles, but for the comprehensive information, the full report is what you’ll want to read. Go to the source.
We will be doing the Voice of the Customer Report once a year.
In 2023, we’ve grouped the content into five sections:
- What are happy customers talking about?
- What are unhappy customers talking about?
- How consumers are thinking about price in 2023
- EV sentiment trends
- Benchmarks of automotive reputation metrics
What we’ve uncovered
- The leading cause of both positive and negative reviews. And they’re not the same.
- How dealer-sold EV and DTC EV sentiment compares to traditional dealership sentiment. The spread might surprise you.
- These topics don’t move the needle for positive reviews. I was surprised to see pricing in the mix.
- Do changing interest rates impact sentiment? We look at the Q2 rate hike.
Putting this all together, we’ve offered some guidance on maximizing positive and negative reviews backed by hundreds of thousands of reviews. Jump to pages 21 and 26 in the report.
The report is out now.
Jake