A few years ago we got a review from a woman who just got her car back from service and she found some McDonald's wrappers in the backseat and she wondered where those had come from and it turns out that she had a dash cam on her car and the footage was rolling while her car was in for service and she saw that a couple service advisors had taken the car out for a pretty lengthy trip ride taken it all around town, stopped in McDonald's at the drive-through and ate their food in the car and then a couple of them by mistake left a wrapper in the car they were trying to clean up their tracks but she was pretty upset that they had taken her car for a 15 mile joy ride this was not just like a safety check this was a this was a
What's up everyone this is car dealership guy you're listening to the car dealership guy podcast which is my effort to give you access to the most unbiased and transparent insights into the car market let's get into today's episode Jamie older shall is VP of reputation strategy at cars commerce and GM of dealerator the world's leading car dealer review website in this conversation we discussed launch and dealerator going from startup to a profitable enterprise incentivizing dealership salespeople secrets to carvana's customer service operations leveraging AI at the dealership today's top issues for car buyers and much more but before we get into the show i'd like to thank cars commerce for coming on as a guest and also sponsoring this episode i talk a lot on this podcast about how complicated and disconnected our industry can be with so many different moving parts so as a cars.com dealer inspire customer of many years i was excited to hear Alex vetter announce his team's vision to simplify dealership technology as cars commerce if you missed it they've been connecting the most valuable audience from their cars.com marketplace with innovative technology and media solutions such as dealer inspire accurate and her newly formed cars commerce media network so now this platform means you can work with one partner to advertise to consumers you know are in the market guide them through a seamless customer experience from online to in store and quickly build a differentiated reputation in your market simple that's what we need to improve the customer experience and future-proof local retailers go to cars commerce dot ink or visit the link in the show notes below to see how you can simplify your business and grow profitability
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So my brother-in-law chip brooder came up with the idea of a back in 2002 and he and I started talking about it back in those early days. I don't necessarily consider myself a founder but sort of early advisor to him and to the business model as he grew up. I was at the time living in Santa Fe, New Mexico with my wife and I was selling publishing companies traveling all over the country selling primarily newspaper companies but loved cars and he was a big car guy and had a pretty polarizing experience at a car dealership.
Tell me what happened. Give me the juice. Yeah he was buying a new car. It was a BMW dealership, a local BMW dealership. This is first new car purchase. He was a used car guy up until this point. Super excited to go in there.
Pompity did the whole thing online and put together the car that he wanted. Waited for a while. It got delivered. Turns out that in the time between the order was placed and the order was delivered, the some of the options that he chose became part of the standard package.
So he was actually doing a refund but when he picked up the car they pocketed the difference. They didn't tell him that he was doing a refund. He essentially took the car, was none the wiser and went home and then did some research and figured out that wait a minute he just paid more for the car than he should have.
Told the dealership went back, had a good conversation. They were very apologetic. Salesperson learned a lesson and they went above and beyond to make it right. I think that was to him that was his experience sort of flew in the face of what he sort of considered to be the sort of typical customer experience at a dealership.
He was sort of expecting something to happen and to be taken for something but at the end of the day they realized that they made a mistake and they did something wrong and they wanted to make it right. So they went above and beyond and he was so taken by that experience that he wanted to go share it online.
At that point this was 2002 before Google had reviews before Yelp was a thing and so he's like, I got to share this somewhere. So he's a web developer and decided that he would just spin up a blog and he bought a whole bunch of domain names, dealer, raider, obviously was the one that he ended up settling on but bought a whole bunch of domain names and just spun up a quick blog, wrote that review that was essentially review number one and then encouraged folks on this onload of enthusiast forums to come and share their experiences at car dealerships and all of a sudden he had 10 reviews and then by the end of the month he had 30 reviews and so it was just sort of kind of a hobby thing and he and I sort of talked about it and how to think about you know over the years developing it into a business.
It was really sort of started as kind of a public good right, you just wanted to make sure that there was a platform for transparency. It was not only to make sure that consumers had a place to go to share their experience but also that dealers could learn from the mistakes that happened. So that was sort of this kind of genesis story and I got involved part-time early on and we're always talking about it around you know holidays and this and that and we hired a couple great you know salespeople we put a business model together and I joined the company full-time in 2011. So it's been a lot of fun. So lots of questions.
So first of all what was that early business model like how do you take this kind of hobby or you know public good and then how do you actually start generating revenue? Would you do that? Yeah so I mean for the first six or seven years it was just a static site that was collecting content. We you know went out and bought lists. We tried to list every franchise dealer on the site. There's a lot of manual labor putting all the dealer profiles on the site and we want to make sure that we had a fully representative transparent platform of all the franchise and as many use car dealers as we could across the country and so once we sort of set that foundation we realized that dealers as they were getting content on their pages wanted to leverage positive reviews as testimonials on their websites and they wanted to showcase their salespeople and they wanted to showcase their inventory. They wanted to do a little bit more content marketing than we gave them the opportunity to.
So the business model was really built around how do we you know centrally empower local retailers to leverage our platform which at the time was starting to get a lot of you know SEO juice and you know the use of Google was starting to ramp and if you Google the dealerships name their page on dealerator appeared and so dealers recognized that and they realized that we were sort of part of that that consumer research journey and so we thought hey you know what what if we give dealers an opportunity to upload photos and share the amenities of their dealership and and unlock employee profile pages and share their inventory and so we came up with a very light sort of SaaS business model where we just said hey you if you want to forget what it was back then 95 bucks a month load up your inventory and we'll make your feeds.
We don't know these prices across any platform across any industry nowadays. Yeah it was right I mean so it was just sort of like at that point you know something that this would help us kind of keep you know keep the lights on but we realized quickly that this was something that not only wasn't. important to consumers as our site traffic ramped and consumers were using our site to actively make purchase decisions but dealers were using this information to get better and so for us you know with the the the site was born out of essentially frustration that you know for this sort of this misalignment or the sort of the idea that the industry is sort of misunderstood and wanting to bring that transparency to consumers and make sure that the dealers who really do a good job of providing great customer experience have an opportunity to prove that without them just saying it in their marketing like we're the so like highlighting the good players and you know for lack of a better firm ignoring the bad actors or just not giving them the spotlight.
Yeah I mean we making sure we had content on the bad actors was very important and it continues to do so what do you mean by that like what do you do you know we we want the good and the bad we don't just want to be you know we we don't just want to showcase great dealers and ignore those who aren't providing a great customer experience so for us having that balance of content is really important there are there are you know dealerships that aren't treating customers the way that customers expect to be treated and we and we want to make sure that those voices are heard on our website in a very transparent fair way and so you know I think that's the you know dealerships don't get better without productive feedback if you're just doing a great job look no business is perfect if you're doing a great job and you've got five stars across the board a thousand reviews no instead of bad thing about you consumers these days are like okay something something something's weird with that so you know you can't please everyone all the time you're gonna have people who just aren't happy no matter what you do and those negative experiences show up on our platform and that is what it is when dealers embrace it and that the good dealers that separate themselves in the market are the ones that actually take that feedback and use it to improve their processes instead of getting defensive and say now it's not us it's you and that we see a lot that we I mean over the past 20 years that's obviously it continues to be a common theme.
Some of your your brother-in-law launches this like blog you know web developer guy right like how do you fit into the puzzle like what do you come in and like you know where is that what are you focused on so I focused really more on sort of the operational aspects of the business once we kind of came up with the business model which which he and I talked about my wife helped with some of the early marketing and and so you know he just wanted to put his headphones on and code he was all about building the site figuring out how to sort of improve and add new features etc and when you got the point where I mean look we started making money for the first few years it was essentially making money on Google AdWords right like we were a beta site for Google AdSense and you know I we got a check for a thousand bucks a month and we were pumped right or like you know 2,500 bucks a month was probably our biggest month you know that doesn't support being able to hire another developer or hire JBL.
So the business really took off when we brought on a couple salespeople who were you know well connected in the automotive industry who really got the model who understood what we were trying to build and just went out and spread the word across the country and showed dealers the impact of developing a good reputation and how you know if you do well by your customers and you ask them to share that content you can actually you know you can you can create preference in your market over your competitors so it's something that you needed to pay attention to and all the while you know now TripAdvisor was becoming a thing and Yelp was becoming a thing and so you know we were sort of the first we were the automotive industry's first review site we're probably one of the earliest sort of official review sites across any industry and TripAdvisor beat us by maybe a year or two but I think I tweeted one time at Jeremy Stoppelman tell him dude like your site pisses me off so right if you're listening that doesn't know who that is that's the founder of Yelp yeah yeah exactly yeah and we can get into Yelp later because that's a different thing yeah I know and by the way and you mentioned your brother-in-law once you put his headphone in code I tell him I feel the exact same way I just want to put my headphones in great content so similar personalities there talk to me more about the actual product.
Right, like I'm familiar with the dealerator. I think there's, you know, I think many dealers are familiar with that and many consumers. But for anyone that doesn't know, can you just explain it? What do you actually do?
Right, and by the way, let me rephrase that. What do you actually do today? Because I think it's very clear what you did when you started, but the product has evolved a ton and the company, so go ahead.
Yeah, so today we are the sort of the reputation foundation for car commerce. So all of the user-generated content that we've collected on dealerator, all the salesperson profiles, are now on the cars.com marketplace platform. So we are not just a user-generated content collection engine, but we're also threading in sort of insights that we then feed back to the dealers around various aspects of the processes. What are they doing well? What are they not doing well? How do we help dealers improve their processes? And then, you know, just as importantly, how do we help them elevate their salespeople and help their salespeople build their brands and engage their staff in the review collection process?
Because once you get that wheel spinning where someone's come in and selected your dealership because of reviews and now they're working with someone that they chose on cars.com because they wanted to work with that particular person, they're going to have a good experience, they're going to write a review, and that whole sort of virtuous cycle repeats. So today we're focused on how do we elevate the consumer experience on cars.com but also make sure that we empower the local retailers to get better and improve their processes and show them where they may have fallen short. And then it's up to the dealer to decide whether or not they want to take action or not. But um so for us it's important to make sure that we are building and innovating on new ways to collect content for dealers. So to make it easy for them to just um collect content, to respond to reviews, which is incredibly important, to showcase their salespeople, and to create higher quality connections through giving consumers the ability to select the person they want to work with when they submit a lead on cars.com.
Yeah, I love responding to reviews and, you know, I just like to use it as like, uh, I think if you respond to any business, this is not, you know, this is not specific to cars, but if you respond to reviews, I just think it's a great marketing opportunity, especially if you get like a not so good review because it just immediately shows, you know, immediately shows kind of your brand, your values, your personality. And so, you know, it's funny, we used to actually, uh, we used to like sort of like it when someone didn't leave us a five-star review, but that wasn't, like, that bad, that was like a four-star, three-star, because you already know that that, like, that's gonna get, you know, all the views, everyone's gonna go there and everyone's gonna want to see, like, what happened and how is the situation and how to rectify.
So I don't think this is like a novel insight or anything, but I think it's like, you mentioned it earlier, like when someone has, like, all five-star reviews, like, that's sketch. It's sketch. I mean, look, and, you know, what we found in our data is 97 percent of consumers read review responses. So, like, not only are, like, reviews important, and these days, it's just sort of table stakes that you have reviews, your fresh volume, and you've got a good reputation, but people want to see how you respond. They want to see that communication between you and the customer, even if it's just a positive review, is that, hey, I had a great experience with Sally Smith and, you know, I'll be back, right? To take a moment to say, hey, you know, thank you for sharing that experience, we hope to see you back soon. It's great, you know, working with you. That speaks a lot not only to the person that wrote it because you're now acknowledging that they took the time to do it, but you're also showing people that you want to create that human connection and customer loyalty is important to you. And it's just as important, if not more important, to be responding to negative reviews too because, I mean, you know, to your point, you don't want to read all the good stuff. They want to see how you handled a really crappy situation, and it happens to everyone.
Yeah, I think that's, uh, that's how I view it as well. I like even like just relationships in general, like I always, think just a part of earning trust is, you know, going through challenges and seeing, you know, how each side sort of solves the challenge. And so, to your point, like, that's, that goes also way beyond reviews. It's just like when you earn trust in a relationship to see how someone's going to actually handle a challenge, what are they going to do, how are they going to react, you know, it's a really important part of earning trust.
I want to ask you, like, um, a question from your insight, do you find that... do you find that most people or like what inside do you have to just help defeat the decision-making of consumers like do you find that reviews is enough to get to convince a consumer to like go shop at x y or z store or dealership or is it typically like combined with like some i don't know other forms of advertising or maybe like a warm referral from a friend like how do you think about that our reviews you know good reviews or you know or however we define good here but is that enough to really sort of convince consumer to do business with you yeah i mean i i've seen a recent study that showed that you know consumer reviews are just as important uh than just as important as uh referrals from friends and family so i think you know increasingly these days and we just seen this ramp over the past 15 20 years people are increasingly relying on customer feedback to make purchasing decisions it's all over search it's all over websites i think you know what's important is that consumers trust the source um which is why providing that transparent platform for us and ultimately cause cars commerce has been a really critical component of our growth is making sure that um we show the good and and the bad um but i think you know in the consumer journey people want to be comfortable especially when the birds in a car that they're making the right decision and i think you know relying on um the feedback of others who have been in your shoes and have had that experience um is one of the most important factors in the journey which is why you know cars is committed to ensuring that um part of that sort of consumer experience that dealership feedback is integrated into the shopping experience on the car's commerce platform because that it it actively um not only does it sort of actively create um you know decision points that will go one way or the other in fact you know the majority of consumers won't do business with a dealership that's got negative reviews that haven't been responded to um so i think just making sure that there's you know um that that content is as visible as possible along the way um not only in the dealership dealership selection but also in the salesperson selection which is um something that we take a lot of pride in that's that's sort of you know unique to our platform
I want to ask a quick question with that though. So I had the car model on my podcast earlier this year. If you don't know, she's a really big automotive influencer on Instagram. Special answers, yeah yeah. And so her family, you know, owns dealerships.
So I actually asked her, I was like, hey, so like what's your recommendation here from your experience when it comes to the customer experience and the dealership experience and when it comes to buying a car? And to really get the best experience, she said selecting a salesperson on Dealertor prior to going to a dealership, as opposed she didn't mention selecting a dealership, just selecting a salesperson.
So I actually thought that was, you know, pretty pretty novel. I haven't heard that prior to that conversation.
所以我真的觉得,你知道,这非常新颖。在那次谈话之前,我从未听说过这个观点。
So do you agree with that? Do you think that that's like the smartest way for consumers to shop? And also do you think like dealers should be sort of pushing their teams to be more active on like almost like build their personal brands? Or do you think, you know, the value at the end of the um, accrues to the top to the actual dealership itself? And that's where, you know, the consumer should be focused on? How do you think about that?
Yeah yeah, good good question. I love the car mom, I think she's done an incredible job building her brand, the same way you've done building your brand. Um, and so yeah, I did watch that, uh, that interview. I was thrilled to hear that that was her number one car buying tip was um, making sure that you select the person that you want to work with before you walk into the dealership.
I think, you know, consumers want to have as much choice as they can in the process, and we all know that this is, you know, as the industry evolves, the handoff from online to offline is really important. Um, and I think this is a really important way to sort of bridge that gap is to break down the barriers of mistrust. Another when you're walking into a dealership you're not just going to get the next. up that might not be the right person it might be someone new it might be someone that you don't necessarily connect with um to feel like you have some control over that part of the process i think it's really important and i think um that we found time and time again that that is important to consumers in fact we asked consumers um who have written recent reviews of sales experiences um would they have preferred to select their sales person before they walked in the dealership and 97 percent of them said yes so it's overwhelming data that says yeah like yes this is this is an aspect of the experience that i might be a little bit um unsure of we're cautious of and if we give them that transparency the ability to read bios and say hey has someone you know that i i know from my son's little league team or went to the same high school as i did like you immediately create that bond with someone so when you walk into the dealership you know who to ask for and you feel much more empowered in that process and i think that to me is what's what's the most important thing is um about being able to um give salespeople and service providers the ability to um have their own page on our site some of them think of it think of it as their website you google their name and the dealership's name and that you know that shows up above their linkedin profile if they even have them and people don't index pretty well trust me i've noticed
i got to tell you also like my marketing brain you know everything in my brain is like thinking about marketing so i think it's uh i think it's genius that like the model works so well kind of from the bottoms up because it's like it's like a trojan horse to get into like every dealership like the salesperson uses the dealerator and then next thing you know and other salespeople are using it and then next thing you know the executive team or you know management is like wait what is this great we need to you know we need to sign up a dealerator and you know do more um because now our entire team is using it sort of like the slack model that's at least how my brain thinks of it like you know our you know any other like you know bottoms up sass whatever you want to call it but you know these models that kind of you can get into the to the business through the bottom and kind of work your way up to management it's it's pretty genius i like that we want to have our software in the pockets of every dealership employee to make their daily routines easier better bring data to them
i way you know one of the things on our platform is when someone shares their experience at the dealership they can also rate the individual employee that they had the experience with so if you've got a wrap on your phone as an employee you can see when you get rated um when you know you get stars from a consumer and and it's it's engaging and it helps you have um get better if it's a one star or two star or a three star you can use that to your advantage but um so what i think an important important question to ask is like how do you make money and then secondly do dealers pay to curate positive reviews right like how what's the business model here today
yeah so so dealers can't pay us a dime to curate positive reviews on our site right i'm obviously it's the it's the the good and the bad we're sort of consumer driven in that way um there you know community guidelines that need to be followed um and we obviously are are um we're very um uh focused on content moderation and fraud detection detection and prevention and all that stuff um but so our you know our business model is kind of rolled into the car's platform now so the dealerator product um is essentially it's going to roll into the feature of the premium marketplace product now so we feel that reputation is foundational to the marketplace experience um and so dealers that um have their inventory on cars.com um should also be empowered to you know read and examine and digest and leverage customer feedback to get better and so um one of the tools that we unlock as part of the premium package is the ability to automate the review collection process um plugs right into the dms and you can um you don't have to worry about salespeople asking to get reviews it just goes out to all um all sales and RO customers the past day and um a lot of content gets generated that way um largely positive because dealers on balance are doing a very good job um so we make money essentially through you know the the um the suite of reputation management features that we offer now through the car's platform but we're also integrated into dealer inspired websites and those digital solutions and accutrate and so we're we're the foundational to the the larger cars commerce platform um yeah rather than focusing on selling dealerator as a standalone product which the team isn't doing anymore.
So, how are you handling? Like, I have to imagine you've caught, like, you know, some people gaming the system. You know, doing some things that are, you know, not kosher. Like, how are you handling that, right? Like, I guess two questions, two partner. Like, how, number one, how are you detecting that? Number two, like, what have you detected and how have you done handled that?
Well, back in the early days, we were just trying to look for signs of things that looked weird, right? In fact, one funny story from back in the in the very early days is the weird we noticed that a couple dealerships started that there were some reviews that have been posted in all caps, and they seem they've looked a little weird. So, um, I was we're like, what is this? What, why are all these reviews written in all caps? And I was at a dealership um a couple weeks later and I noticed that the rep that I was working with was in his rental CRM and he had the caps lock and everything was all caps. Now it's like, wait a minute, these guys are going from typing review like you know putting information into the CRM right into writing a fraudulent review on our platform and they're not turning the caps lock off.
So that was one of our sort of very early kind of primitive fraud detection features but since then we um we we've added a lot of um technological advances in terms of um good so we we pull the unique device ID we look at that we do a reverse ID look up to see where the review has been written from um and uh and we have being profanity filters and all that kind of stuff with some secret sauce in there and and we also read the reads so so we have human moderators too we're starting to leverage AI that's trained on fraudulent reviews and community guidelines violations so um we've spent a lot of time and money and effort in making sure that uh we we create and curate that transparent market so important.
Yeah, I I had a recently a guy named Frank McKenna shout out Frank McKenna, he's a partner of the podcast and he uh he's with a company called Point Predictive but they're dealing with like dealership fraud and stuff like that and we actually didn't discuss like this level of like uh like customer experience or review so it's actually and you mentioned a good point like it makes me wonder like if this is another area or you know somehow an opportunity um for a company like that but it's definitely I mean it doesn't surprise me because it's you know it's it's every business I mean you know it's it's there's always going to be you know um I actually think that if you from my experience if you if you implement into your process just in general kind of debt customer feedback it's pretty easy like I don't really believe in I'm personally not a believer in incentivizing the team to collect or collect reviews I think that you know and you could tell me like you think differently but I feel like it should be part of just the process it's like it's like it's like you're building your brand like you want to earn more business then you obviously want to you know build up your reputation kind of what's your take on that?
Yeah, we we know we I completely agree, we actively advise dealers not to incentivize uh their employees to go out and solicit uh reviews. I mean you know I know a lot of dealerships do it, we can't necessarily stop it but it's a very slippery slope because it does create bad behavior um and ultimately dealers sometimes get penalized because they're it comes back to bite them the sense that we find fraudulent reviews salespeople are writing 10 reviews from their iPad at you know midnight um on the night before sort of the you know month ends right we sort of see the spike in month end reviews and and then a lot of it is fraudulent reviews generated by um employees that are trying to get in the bunch that you know they haven't been able to get from actual consumers so yeah it's a it's a problem and it's something that we've always been sort of preaching against um and uh yeah I think that the dealers that do it the right way are those that don't put pressure on the salespeople or service advisors to get reviews but just automate the process um yes you can ask for it say hey you know you're gonna get a request do me a favor if you had a good experience share some some feedback great um but in incentivizing this this stuff it's a slippery slope.
What do you think generally about consumer or like being able to leave an anonymous review like what's your take on that in your position like because I think the other side here is when people are just trying to retaliate for some reason maybe they didn't get what they wanted regardless of the merit behind that like and then they leave you anonymous review could even be like a you know vindictive past employee or something who knows but like how do you handle that what's your take on that?
We've always taken the position that we're not going to force consumers to reveal themselves uh in in in terms of who they are. I think. sometimes consumers need to feel like they're protected and that they have the opportunity to share feedback without fear of retribution
I think the reality though is that if you're sharing a legitimate review and it's a negative review and it's feedback the good dealers know exactly who that person is and sometimes dealers will just call that person and say hey I saw that you wrote a review on dealerator and they'll say what what do you mean that but then but they've described exactly what the problem was because each problem is unique and so many times dealers know exactly who this person is in situations where you know there's uh an exhales person who's upset or or you know we get fraudulent content that way you know we're typically able to to detect that because um you know we can we can also see where the review was was written from so we can see if the review was written in a competing dealership or we can see if there are five reviews written from the same device and and and we will on occasion um depending on the sort of severity of of the of the content um will reach out to the customer and we'll do it we'll actually look at the email address and see if this was a burner email to address that we've just created for this so we we will take extra steps um as opposed to google right like we'll like we actually have people who are employed to um make sure that we uh are being fair and only have the the the most you know trust and transparent content on the site because there's we've just when I think I've seen everything another day comes along and there's something new so there's there's always something um uh that dealers are trying to get you mentioned Yelp earlier so um I'm curious here your thoughts there what's what's your take on Yelp yeah you know it's funny I don't give Yelp a lot of thought to be honest um they're they're a little bit bigger on the west coast but for me you know Yelp Yelp isn't a platform that's built necessarily for automotive it's a platform that's built for a very sort of frequency of transactional model like restaurants or salons or hotels um you know carbine and car servicing is very episodic and I think Yelp tends to favor um the reviewers that are essentially yelpers that come and share feedback on everything right and I think Yelp has been very um transparent that their algorithm you know will favor reviews that are written by um yelpers that are known to them that are very active on that platform
for us we don't we you know if someone just bought a car they never been on to you know uh dealerator or they haven't been to our site or you know have that many cars or dealerator to read review in four or five years we want that content to show up at the top right because we show it chronologically rather than being buried at the bottom under other reviews so I think Yelp takes a different approach to curating their content that I just philosophically don't line with that that other that other reviews thing is like the bane of my existence that thing is I can't tell you how many how many frustrating phone calls uh I know people that have had over that so yeah it's I we don't you know it's funny we usually will hear from dealers if they if they really want Yelp to be highlighted or want us to help them monitor Yelp content and we we will and we we do but to be honest over the years the the I think the interest in Yelp from at least in automotive um has significantly dwindled because they're just they're not on a motor focus like we are um and they can provide that feedback I think dealers feel it so they can kind of a bad rap from Yelp which I would tend to agree with I'm curious to hear more about like your insight into the just the current car market figure like being in your position I can only imagine you know how many do you know like roughly how many reviews do you get per day or per month you see yeah so we get about 120,000 reviews a month okay so like my brain is right away saying like if we put all those 120,000 reviews through some you know AI agent and we do like a sentiment check right like you could probably glean like just like a hell of a scent uh of a pulse for what is happening out there um maybe you do that already maybe not you know I'm curious here we're gonna say there but what is um what are you seeing right now like in the market like what's driving people crazy or like or maybe let's rephrase that in a positive way like where are the opportunities to you know improve in the industry right now?
So you're right I mean we have a tremendous amount of content and we're working on some data uh hopefully that we'll look it out there in a in a couple months but yeah we're you know I think the the most common concern or complaint that we hear from consumers is lack of communication not being not getting you know timely follow-ups whether it be for sales or service that's what we see most often is the consumers are frustrated with the fact that they're just not getting a call back or they're when they're going to call back it's too late which kind of dovetails into something that we recently started collecting feedback on on cars.com which is how did dealers do handling leaves that were submitted through cars and what we found now through um you know hundreds of thousands of points of feedback and over maybe 12,000 dealerships is that 30 percent of dealerships are sorry 30 percent of the leads submitted through cars.com aren't getting a response within 72 hours from the dealership so that's a tremendous amount of leads that are getting submitted that just aren't getting a response or maybe getting a late response right so that goes back to the communication piece which is then that comes through in the review content is that consumers are generally sort of discouraged with the quality of the communication or they're leaving a message and not getting a call back or they've been inquiring about this car for weeks and now they just heard back and it's been sold so I think that that frustration comes through in the content um so I think that's a big opportunity there for dealers to inspect their BDC processes to make sure that salespeople are being responsive the service advisors are being responsive because it happens on you know obviously in the fixed ops side as well perhaps even more acutely there.
What is that but what is that emblematic of like do you think that's a do you think that's like a structural flaw in the dealership model like does the dealership model have to you know does it does it have to change like is that just not part of the process somehow in the future is that automated or is this something that you think if if it's done right consumers prefer it like what do you think about that?
I think well I think you know it to be responsive it should be something that's sort of first and foremost on the mind of any customer focused dealership. I think there will sort of evolve into the tools that allow dealerships to be more responsive in the future. It's you know not just that someone wants to talk to a human it could be just a text or a note or something something that shows that they actually got your correspondence and they will get back to you right sometimes people just want to know that they've been heard um so I think that you know as dealership model evolves you know people want to connect with humans I think we'll always have that component of the carbine experience and so um you know as long as we can provide dealers with examples that could that and then actually what's interesting is with this lead handling scoring that I just described we can provide dealers the actual leads that weren't responded to so you can take that data and go back and say okay like who who when did this lead come in who is supposed to call this person back why didn't they so if you want to get tactical and dig into it we can provide you with that data um but I think dealers in general just need to understand that just the the foundation of a good customer experience is being communicative.
This is going to sound oversimplified but like how are we in 2023 not at a point where any question a customer could possibly have had need to get answered by a human I can't just be automatically answered like again something that you probably know and I don't but like what are like there has to be like you know 10 questions that are like 80% of the questions that customers submit am I right with that like how is that not automated yet and you know like I it would be beautiful to get to a point where you know the the in-store employees and people generally people that work in customer service are are focused on um you know focused on that the in person kind of experience um and where all that stuff behind the scene is automated like is that is that a kind of a future we're headed towards what do you think about that?
I don't know I think there will always be a mix of technology and human and human interaction that's important in a transaction like this I think if if we ever get there it's it's a long way down the road and and and I'm not sure what that what that looks like because like I can't quite visualize it that's some kind of dystopian future but I you know I do think that as long as we are humans and we want to buy you know we like we want to make big purchases we want to shake someone's hand and we want to have a communication you know we like we want to talk with someone before we purchase you want to get comfortable.
yeah yeah you know I had um I hired someone a couple years back and I was really interesting because we had this whole like this whole vision at the time of um you know going more kind of going more online and um just you know just you know evolving the customer experience but specifically we were we were trying to pick up lessons from other players in industry that were really heavy online obviously Carvana was one of them and I remember this guy telling me he said he said I'll tell you a secret he's like um and for and I can't confirm this so take him with a grain of salt but he said Carvana's customer service center in Arizona is bigger than any other room or office or anything you could imagine pretty much implying that you know customers and I don't know what percentage today but customers are you know calling in you know like it's it's the sale is still sort of happening with a human just happening remotely and I just you know found a fascinating because I think if you're not from the industry and you look at like someone like Carvana or you know any other player that's really heavy online you kind of think like oh yeah they're you know people are just buying online they're not talking to someone and it was pretty eye opening to see that you know to kind of learn about just the customer service teams that are behind these companies that are you know speaking with many many customers that are buying cars on them so that was interesting insight right
yeah I'm I'm not surprised man I think AI will help improve customer support I don't think it's necessarily going to replace the human customer experience so I think we'll we'll find efficiencies through AI and I think you know we'll you know models will be built that that allow dealerships manufacturers to leverage AI to answer a lot of frequently asked questions but I think when it comes to very specific customizations and actually you know finalizing a purchase there there is there's a lot to be said for the offline in-store experience I think that's what we're focused on empowering is is both both sides of that both the online getting folks comfortable with where they're going comfortable with who they're going to go talk to getting as much of the work done as they can in advance and then going into the dealership to finish the transaction at the local level
do you see any patterns with like specific brands like could you say like certain brands or certain OEMs like have the best reviews for you know sales experience ownership experience what do you see across that
Yeah we know we've we've got some data that will be coming out shortly on on that I would just say general not to name names today but I you know I think we've we've found that largely OEMs are doing a great job providing a good consistent customer experience these days yes there are margins of differences between them in various categories and I think one of the competitive differentiators of the way that we collect content is we're asking about various you know aspects of the customer experience at the dealership so price transparency trade-in financing so you're you're really breaking it down to like piece by piece of the customer experience we're breaking it down right so it's not just like hey this overall experience was great but the trading experience was wasn't fantastic financing was great these sales people did a good job and so we want to bring that feedback and I think when you know to be able to roll it up not just at the dealership level but roll it up to. the OEM level and then regionally to say hey you know this is you have an issue with this particular aspect of the customer experience in this particular region I think is really powerful as we think about being able to enable brands to get a little bit of a better bird's eye view of how their retailers are doing so I think brands in general are doing a fantastic job and providing a great customer experience again it's a margin of you know 0.123 or four stars you know between them but I think there is differentiation when you get into the more sort of granular sub-reading categories that you know only were able to provide back to them
So, so give us the bottom line right like first of all if I'm a consumer what's the what's the best way to make that car purchase and then if I am in a business owner or dealer what is the best way to leverage you know a platform like dealerator like can you give us like give us the summary or a punchline yeah i mean i think as a as a consumer obviously i'm biased so say you go to cut you know cars.com and start your experience there and and you know there's a tremendous amount you're going to accomplish on that site it's about finding the right car doing the research reading the editorial content valuing your trade-in and getting pre-approved for financing and then at that point selecting the person that you want to work with when you go into dealership to finish the transaction um so get as much as you can done online and then you know um handed off to the local uh retailer that were you know essentially enabling to do their job and complete the transaction so you are definitely saying select that you know select who you're going to work with upfront that's your best chances for success yeah i think when what we found in fact in our data is that when consumers select the person that they want to work with that deal closes at a two and a half times faster rate right so this is a 2.5x increase in lead to close when someone selects the person that they want to work with it's a signal of high intent it means that they are not only serious about buying a car but but they now also like know who they're going to work with that's that's not a mystery to them anymore so it like it clears the path to purchase yeah it makes total sense it makes you more comfortable right is that for service as well by the way uh yeah i mean we so service advisors are rated on our our platform all the time and in fact i would say that service reviews are really hard to get because it's a lot harder to get someone excited about writing review of an old change job than it is the brand new car right but if if if you can get great service reviews those are even more valuable than good sales reviews because people want to work with dealerships that they can see having a long-term relationship with and so the reading the service reviews ironically is important to people who are looking to buy a car because they not only want to see that the car buying experience was.
Painless but that when they need to bring the car back to that local retailer for service they're going to do a great job so that's a really interesting aspect something that we found over the years is that service reviews are potentially even more valuable or not potentially but are even more valuable than sales reviews because they're harder to get but they they're much more impactful on buyer choice so it's interesting and then on the dealer side what were you going to say yeah so on the dealer side i think you know what's what we take a lot of pride in and this goes back to sort of being able to get more granular with the experience is you know we want to make sure the dealers have as much visibility into their dealership experience as we can provide to them so when we ask for feedback from consumers unlike google we're asking for you know how did the dealership do with the trade and experience with the financing experience with the speed of the transaction with pricing transparency. with the quality of work if it's a service lane rate the people that you did business with so we can provide a really interesting important powerful granular data back to dealers to empower them to get better and so it's not just the consumer side of the marketplace and showing the good and the bad of experience but it's also empowering dealers who are engaged with our platform and engaged with providing a great customer experience ways that they can get better not just that someone had a bad experience but someone dropped the ball during the trade and experience so this person dropped the ball during the trade and experience and you need to go talk with them with bdc's not calling people back so you need to go deal with that so we want dealerships to get better we also want to make sure that the dealers that are providing good customer experience are the ones that get their vehicles seen by more consumers on the site because we have you know we want to make sure that the consumers on cars.com are getting a good experience and finding the right vehicle for them and that they can go and get that deal done at the dealership.
Well dude you've built a hell of a product so congrats this is uh it's really really impressive before we hop off I do have one other question like what's the what's your vision for the evolution of the product like what does the future look like you know you mentioned AI like is there any like an interesting implementation how do you think about that?
Well I think you know we're very much in early innings with AI I think there's a lot of interesting applications there both from a consumer facing review summarization standpoint which we've started to do some you know there's some some dealers that have 5,000 reviews and consumers are going to scroll through every every review but they would love to read a thumbnail sketch of how that dealership's doing the good and the bad so we're leveraging AI for for that. We'll you know we'll leverage it in content moderation as well to get better and smarter with how we ensure that we have a more um fair and sort of balanced way in which we moderate content but I think ultimately at the end of the day we want to be the definitive voice of the customer for automotive we want cars commerce to be the platform that provides not only you know the most transparent and useful and delightful experience for consumers to shop for vehicles and to choose the right person but also to enable local retailers to get better and so there are lots of ways we can do that through through AI that it all starts with content and so we're focused on on collecting that content making sure that we are that sort of industry vacuum that takes all of that customer feedback and processes it in a consumer facing way but you know helps enable the you know the local all the retail experience but also at the end of the day helps push the industry forward because it could it goes back to the mission of what you know why we were built originally which was to improve the automotive retail experience for both buyers and sellers and so we're going to stay true to that but continue to innovate along the way with how we collect content and how we share it back with consumers and also dealers
I love it Jamie thanks so much and and if anyone wants to to learn more about you dealerator the platform where can they reach where can they come to you yeah sure so i'm Jamie J me at cars commerce dot dink or Jamie at dealerator.com but dealerator is now officially um the sort of you know reputation capability for cars commerce and anyone can reach me there anytime and happy to engage with anyone in your audience and well and i'll put the link in the show notes as well so it's going to be down there as well Jamie thanks for coming on this was awesome great to talk with you thanks for having me all right hope you enjoyed that episode please give the podcast a rating consider subscribing to the show and check the show notes. for links to what we talked about thanks for tuning in i'll see you guys next time