#27 - Maintaining a Great Online Reputation in Your BHPH Operation

Welcome to the Independent Dealer podcast. The podcast for auto dealers to learn and grow together. Here are your hosts, Luke Godwin and Jeff Watson.

Columbia, South Carolina. We are a buy here payer dealership. We've been in business 34 years. I'm a third generation car dealer. My grandfather was a Ford dealer in a little small town, Queensborough, South Carolina from the mid-70s until the early 80s. The recession kind of got better of him during that time and my dad opened the store where we were at now in 1985. I've been working day to day operation and business since 96 when I was in college. And then as soon as I graduated I took a little sabbatical but started full time back running the dealership on September 1, 2001. So you know what happened 10 days later and it just, that was a tiresome time for us all. But it also, it shows you how running a business properly can get you through hard times and make you better for the cause of it. So anyway, today we're going to talk about maintaining your reputation and buying your payer dealership. You could probably say, hey, what does it matter? I'm a buy your pay your store. I don't necessarily need, I don't need five star Google reviews, right? Well you do because Your reputation matters 100% no matter what your business is. Who in here show hands, Keep hands up too. So who in here has ever gotten a five star review on Google? Alright, I won't see everybody saying keep it up, keep it up. Who's got a negative review? Everybody still. Okay, all right, so that right there, that's what we're looking for, five stars, right? So how do we go about doing that? I'm going to tell you about here. Paying your dealership, your customer service has to be your business. If you treat that customer right with their car, treat them right as a human being, they're going to pay for it. They've got to have that to get to work. So I ask you the question, are you interested in making money or enhancing your customer's life and or doing that? What's more important to you? I think we would all argue that enhancing our customers life is a huge deal. Not everybody has it as easy as we do, right? So you need to find out how is your dealership received in your community, your own line reputation matters. So if you look back and when my dad started business in 85, of course you didn't have to worry about a Google review, right? What you had to worry about was word of mile. So you can look kind of how it goes up in 04, maybe a little bit. Before that, we really started worrying about what was going on online with our reputation. 2012, this thing around that time SEO came up, you know, search engine optimization, how is that going to affect our business? And today everything is affected by how many 5 star reviews you have or how many 1 star reviews you have. So I'm looking at my box zones and I can go back and kind of find out exactly how it went up. Because everything on the Internet stays there forever, right? So our first online review was on Yahoo. Does everybody remember Yahoo? Okay, we had a customer that was traveling from Myrtle beach back in Knoxville, Tennessee, and their car broke down and their car was junk. I wouldn't have driven it from Knoxville, Tennessee to Myrtle Beach. That's a long way. We had a car that fit the bill of what they needed. A Ford Explorer, I think probably a 2000 model Ford Explorer. Well, they purchased that from us on their way back from vacation, maybe 3,500, $4,000. They drove it home and made it home. Well, as soon as they got home, they left us a five star review. Or maybe not even five star back then on Yahoo, it was just a review. Right? But it was a glowing review. 2012, we had our first negative review and it was on Yelp. We repossessed a customer's car that didn't have insurance. It was a $15,000 Yukon Denali XL. Riding around without insurance. I repossessed the car. That's probably the right thing to do, right? Well, she didn't think so. And that customer read us the riot act. She just got homeless on Yelp. Well, we may have deserved it because we may not have reached out to the customer like we should have. We since sold that customer a $50,000 Cadillac Escalade. So that one car, one bad review, we turned it into a pasta, and she changed the review on you and we sold her another car. Around 2015, we really started getting Google reviews in 16, late 15, early 16, I decided that reviews were so important, it needed to be part of our commission base. Then early 17, I said, you know, I need one person on staff to make sure to head this project and get what we need to get when it comes to reviews. By the end of this year, we should be at 500 five star Google reviews. And we have not paid a single software company anything to do that. Okay. Because we set the motion. We set a path in motion for everyone to make sure that they do that. And it goes from the Bottom to the top of our business. You need to know what your competition looks like around you. So you need to get online and you need to say whatever town you're in, what are the highest ranked Google car dealers in this area and have chart if you want to make XL scratchy knowing what's going on. So if you look, I just drafted people in the Columbia Lexington area and we probably have one of the highest Uber rankings in that area because we care about it. Do your research because your customer does their research before they do anything. Before they buy a taco. I'd be willing to bet you they're checking it out to see who has the best tacos in the right. Something we found out by putting this together that I didn't know. Customers can search independent car dealership Columbia, South Carolina or used car dealership Comey, South Carolina. And then after they do that, they can click. If you see right here, they can click and then decide I don't want to see anybody with less than a 3.5 star rating. Anybody know that you can do that? I mean that's impressive, right? Google cares so much that they will knock you out of the listing if they don't believe you're somebody that a customer needs to do business with. So it does matter. Something that I'm afraid that we don't ask enough in our industry is buyer payer dealers. Our car business is in general because you always hear everybody talking, well, you know that guy, we just made four grand on that guy or girl and man, they didn't even know what they bought. I mean, how many times have y' all seen this happen or heard a sales staff say that or that customer couldn't buy a ham sandwich, say they had a 400 beacon score. You know, they're horrible. This and that and other. Well, I say that everybody should be treated like they have a 700 vehicle score. Every single one of our customers. And the reason that is is because I know I want to be treated like that, right? Good, bad or indifferent, when it comes to credit, it doesn't matter. Also is our customers, have they ever been wowed by an experience at a steakhouse or a hotel or buying a. If you do wow them, what are they going to do for you? Who are they going to tell? I'd be willing to bet you if you wow a customer that day, they're going to go tell 10 people, right? And you can't quantify, you can't pay for that. You know, wow. Every customer walks through your life. It makes you A sales staff for wow. If you see a sales staff person going well with a customer, they come back in and they just berate that customer. You, you probably need a new salesperson because their sales are going to go down and somebody's going to hear them say that and it's going to cost you more customers in the long run. I know it's hard to do. Sometimes customers can really irritate us. But you really got to listen to the culture inside your dealership. So my question is, why haven't you been an ask why haven't Buy Here Pay Here stores thought about their customer experience and how it's going to affect our business? What can we do to change it in our dealership? How can we make the customer experience at our dealership be the same as the customer experience at the 10 million dollar Lexus facility right down the street? Right. I have so many friends I sell Lexus to and when the car's sold on warranty, they're taking it there for customer service and they're wowed every time they get a nice Lexus to drive while the car's in service. The place looks like a Taj Mahal. Either it's got, it's got free coffee, it's got marble floors, it's got all this. Well, why can't we do the same in our industry? So how hard is it to train an employee to treat others like they want to be treated? I don't think it's hard if you get the right person. So make sure that you're instilling that in every employee in your office. So what's the most important customer engagement at your dealership? Anybody want to take a guess? Like what's the, who's the front line of your dealership? Anybody? Sales. Sales. That's right. And buy your pay here is also, that's your front line, but then your secondary line is your collection department. So every time one of our employees interacts with somebody, you need to make sure they're doing it the right way. What can you do to ensure that their customer experience is great? Well, number one, you've got to hire the right person. Right. And number two, you've got to make sure they are trained properly. So how do we determine if that customer experience is right? Well, we've already talked about that. We look at our reviews. You can probably see pretty easily if you're not doing something right because if you have Google my business on your phone, you will know every time you get a review because it's going to send You a push notification going, hey, I've got a bad review or hey, I just got a great review. So make sure that you know what's going on. And also look at the reviews from your other, your other competitors. Watch the interactions between your employees and customers. We've already kind of talked about that, but we'll come back to that in a second. Again, reviews are indication of any problems that may exist. You will know really quickly if you've got someone in your store and your service department wherever who's not doing their job properly because it will show up online. They believe a negative review. They may even leave a negative review about you, okay? Cause it happens. You might fire the wrong staff member and get a bad review because I've done that. I hired the wrong staff person to start with, okay? That's the reason I had to fire and that's the reason they ended up doing that. So reviews are going to give you that insight and watch the interactions between your customers. If you and your employees. If you've got an employee that you get constantly told they aren't doing their job properly, you've got a problem. You either need to take corrective actions with that employee or you need to get rid of that employee. What we're talking about, are they in the correct role at your leadership? You may have someone. For instance, we had someone who probably pretty good at his job, but he's terrible at customer service. So, you know, I had him in the perfect position, right? No, I didn't. I had him as that service advisor, you know, and how many times did customers call me and say, hey, you got a real issue here. And I kept putting it off and putting it off and you know, I probably should have had him as a parts manager where he's not talking to customers, all he's dealing with is text. But I was hard hit and I didn't do it. And you know, we probably lost. Why we didn't probably lose. We lost some of my really good customer pay customers because of him. Now we're slowly getting them back, but I could have moved any long before and probably not had that problem. And finally they may need to work somewhere else. That's the last thing you want to do. But every once in a while you need to get rid of somebody. All right, so what's your plan of action? I need five star Google reviews. I need five star Facebook reviews or recommendations. I guess it is now. I need five star Yelp reviews. We're not gonna go down the rabbit hole of Yelp, right? Now, because nobody hears from Yelp, right? I think they're extortionists that don't know how to extort people. I figured as soon as I started paying Yelp money, they would probably recommend the 515 star Yelp reviews I had are not recommended, right? No. They don't even know how to take my money and do what I have. So anyway, that's another rap plan of action. We got to train our staff how to deal with unhappy customers because you are going to have unhappy customers. I'm sorry, guys. Cars break, right? You're going to have a transmission go out bar. You're going to have a radiator bus when it's 110 degrees outside Columbia, South Carolina. You're going to have ACS quit, you know, after the day after you sold the car in 110°, 85% humidity in Columbia, South Carolina. So to figure that out and to make sure that those unhappy customers don't stay unhappy for long, you need to empower your staff to make customers happy at the lowest levels of authority. What does that mean? I stole this from Bob Taska from Taska Ford Book. If you read this. But if a technician takes a customer's car back for an oil change and let's say their feet were dirty and they got in the car and they got a little bit of oil on the floorboard and he's rushing, he forgets about it, takes the car back up front and next thing you know, the service advisor misses it and they give it back to the customer and the customer is just flipping out, right? Oh my gosh. This is. I've got beautiful tan carpet now. I've got this big black boot marked in the middle of it. What do you do? Well, let's say the only person that customer could find was the porter because everybody else was running around. I want that porter to be able to make it right. That porter should say, no problem, Mr. Customer. We're going to pull this right back here to detail. We're going to clean it up for you right now. That's what I'm talking about. The lowest level. If you've got a customer that you know, that's been a great customer that's paid every bill on time and their car comes in and it's overheating and it's out of warranty and you know, they've had it for two years. I want my service. And the customer doesn't have any money because that never happens in the bike payer business, right? I want my service Advisor to be able to make the call. How can we get this customer back in the room? Can I give this customer a mobile car while we're doing it? That's what I mean, guys. They shouldn't have to call me. They shouldn't have to call their management. They should be able to make the customer happy right in. Alright, so we're doing everything right or we're doing everything wrong and it's just going on and we get a review. What do we do? How do we make sure that if we do get a review, we handle it properly? So who in here has gotten a bad review that actually deserves a bad review? Everybody's hands should go up right now. Okay? We do not do everything right all the time. Even though we may think we do, we may be so mad at a customer that we, you know, that we deserve a bad review because we said something we shouldn't have said or we didn't handle well. We didn't handle the situation properly because we were mad at the customer. So if the review is less than expected, you should address the customer's issue immediately and you shouldn't blame the customer. If the customer bought the car and they drove it and it started running hot and they kept driving it until it just fried the engine and. And you know, because they trying to get to the hospital because their mama was in the hospital, Sometimes life happens, right? Well, you don't go well, Mr. Customer or Mrs. Customer. You did this because of that. That's not necessarily the way to handle that. Okay? That will lead to many better use. Invite the customer, engage with you offline if you have an issue. If they, if you get on Facebook and somebody goes, hey, Godwaters is a horrible place. This, that and the other. They did this to my, my sister very politely, direct message that customer or just say, hey, this is my phone number, this is my email. Please contact me. Let's see if we can make this right. Never berate or belittle the customer in a social media fight. That never. That never works. We all know that, right? Don't ever do that. Most of the time, if you are doing business right, customers will come to your back. They will do it. Every time you start getting into a fight, it's gonna make you look bad. So don't do it. Let your customers do that again. Invite them to discuss this offline. Always thank your customers for good reviews. When you get a review, go in there immediately, address it, say, thank you so much, it was so enjoyable, you know, to speak with you today. What can we do to make it, you know, what can we do to make your experience better if it wasn't perfect? You know all this, just respond to every review and make sure that we're doing it professionally. So in a five star review response, it's pretty simple. I love this review. I mean, she went on and on, she talked about the person she dealt with. I can remember this customer today, she came in, she wanted this big jacked up 2014 Ram we had. And she's a manager at Waffle House and she's been there for like five years. I'm like, what is this little lady wanting this big jacked up truck? Let's move her to something else, right? Well, I tried that. It didn't work. And I could tell she was getting mad. So I looked back over the application and she goes, I came here because I want that truck. Well, we sold her that truck. That was two years ago. She's paying 500 something a month right now to do that. So I think we did the right thing. But I said, thanks for the kind words. It's great to meet you. And we made sure we got the truck you wanted. One star review. So this one is not a deserved one star review. We repossessed this lady's car because she was a horrible, horrible. Like, I don't even think, I think she was the first name of default, just horrible. Well, she had left us a five star review when she left the office. Okay. And so if you see, when she left the five star review, the first thing I said was thanks for the review. And I thank her for that review. But then after we repossessed her car and told her she needed to pay the car off to get it back, I don't even know if we told her that. We may have. I think we probably did. Anyway, she updated her review. I wouldn't really go down all the rabbit hole of what she was talking about. It's all lies. But I said, thanks for updating your review. I'd love to give our part of this story. Unfortunately, I will not share your private information online. Okay. Make sure you don't ever do that. Your story doesn't have a happy ending and that makes us sad. I wish this was not the case, but sometimes it's best to break business ties for some customers because we all should fire our customers every once in a while because it's just not going to work out. So be nice, be polite. When people see this, they know that probably what she said is not true. Right? This one we deserve Okay, a Yelp review. And that son of a gun is still there, y'. All. I've got three recommended Yelp reviews. Two five stars, 51 unrecommended. Five stars, mind you. And then this one flipping one star. She came here a lot. And I was out running this 200 mile race through South Carolina, this relay race. I didn't run 200 miles. And I saw it come through and I was like, oh my gosh, what happened? Well, she saw us. She saw us on tv talk about how great we are. She got to our dealership and the experience wasn't the same. There was a disconnect, right? The disconnect was I had a lazy top producing salesperson who sat in his office. And a lot of times on Friday, he went out too late Thursday nights and he slept in his office on Fridays. Okay? Well, that top performer no longer works for us. And we sell more cars, okay? So don't be afraid to get rid of somebody. But we address it. Hey, some people like to buy cars different ways, right? Some people like to let customers walk around. Some customers don't like that. Some dealerships spread out to the customer and they get there and they say, hey, how can I help you? What does that customer say? Just looking. Every time, right? So there's all kinds of different ways. We won't even go down that rabbit hole of how we introduce. But if you do want to hear somebody that knows really how to handle that Marshall Zoner right there, that guy can teach you something when it comes to sales processing. Anyway, we address everything she talked about and we make sure now that that's not what happens. It still happens every once in a while. Cause we get too busy. We had a review not long ago. Hey, nobody came out and waiting on them. Well, we didn't have enough staff to wait on every customer. That does happen sometimes. Let's get better at that if we can. If you see a salesperson with someone and you're the only person left, walk out there and say hello to that customer. Just cause you're an owner doesn't mean anything. Just go out there and say hello. Because in the end you don't want a bad review because nobody helped the customer. Customer evangelism, that is what it's about. You want every customer that leaves your dealership to. To tell someone else, I just left. Godamotors, they were wonderful. I want to make sure you buy a car from there. You know, you want everybody walks down the street to talk about goddamotors. So the way you get that is you have a wow experience. You have artful attentiveness to every customer you deal with. Make sure your staff does that too, and deliver what the customer expects. If they see a rosy television ad of me and my daughter talking about how great we are and how we finance you, not your credit, which is trademark, please don't use that. I will sue you. Make sure that when they get to the dealership, that is what they're experiencing. If they're not, you need to train your staff better or you need more staff. So make sure that we do that and take responsibility for customers. Issue. If there's an issue that, that you miss during your inspection process, fix the problem. Be active in the customer's community. And this matters so much, y'. All, being active in your community is great, right? But your community and your customer's community may be two different things. You know, we may live in a certain part of town that our customer can't afford to live in. You know, we may go to a church that doesn't fit our customer's culture. So you need to make sure that not only are you involved in your community, be involved in your customer's community, because that goes a long way. You know, that's a sales promotion expense, not necessarily an expense. So make sure that you're doing that. Empower your employees to fix problems and fix customers. Get started quickly. That is probably the biggest thing. If you let something just drag on and drag on and drag on. Every day that you don't call that customer back, there's no way that customer is going to be mad. And you may leave 100 messages and that customer may never call you back, but you did what you needed to do and in a timely manner. Why now? Why do we need to focus on this now? Well, you need to focus on it because right now a lot of our customers can go to a new car store and buy a car, right? But it's probably being financed for 84 months. So we know how that's going to end up, right? So they're going to have new disaster on their record, and next thing you know, they're going to come back to us. But they've already had that new car store experience. So when they come back to us, their experience may not. It may not be what they have experienced. So we need to make sure that we treat every buyer, payer customer, any customer, period. If you're retail, whatever, like you want to be treated every day. So what are we going to do? Step one, we're going to train and empower our employees. That's number one. When you go back, you need to train every week, every day you see somebody not doing what their stuff is doing, talk to them about it, don't break them and verify your employees are going above and beyond in everything they do. Again, if that oil change tech brings that car up there, make sure that they are looking to make sure they didn't get anything dirty. So if, you know, if you've got a detailed guy, he walks a lot every day and sees a cut, my car's dirty. My detail guy comes to me and says, hey look, I need to grab the keys of that, I detailed it, I need to get back to the detail. It's just not looking right. If a customer's car comes in and the detail guy sees it as kind of dirty, you know, he may try to upsell, he may get a customer pay detail out of that. So say, hey, we're running a special day. Can we detail your car? So make sure you're going above and beyond and ask for reviews, guys and gals. The number one way to ensure you're not going to get a five star review is not to ask for one. So incorporate into your pay plans and make sure everybody on staff is good. And so this is a new term that I just heard the other day, but it's social proof and that is how are you viewed on the web to your customers? It's the proof of life. You know, somebody wants to go anything about that like it's the proof of your business on social media and we want to be better than everybody else's. Right. The payoff of doing this is more sales because you're going to rank higher in Google, you're going to appear more in Facebook. It's going to be, it's going to be better for everybody, better collections. If you're treating your customers properly, I guarantee your collection rates going to go up. If you're repossessing a bunch of cars because they broke down, well, there might be a reason they broke down and you repossessed them. And it may not be the customer's fault. So if you bring this all the way to your recon staff, bring this all the way to your collection staff, you're going to make more money from better collections and branding stations. What I mean by that is if, if your brand in your area in Columbia South Carnival, we have a good brand. If I decide that I want to open up a standalone oil change center, I'm already going to have that social Proof I'm already going to have that brand recognition. You know, if you're really good at it, you have an awesome logo you may sell merchandise from. So there's all kind of different things that the payoff comes from. So again, we're just going back to this. Customer friendly business leads to great social proof and increases your bottom line. So the original question I asked was, are you interested in making money or enhancing your customer's life? You can do both. It's not an either or. It is one leads to the other. Make sure that you start with a customer friendly business again. What now? Audit your reviews. When you get home, respond to any reviews you have not done. Do this over the next several weeks. If you've got 100 reviews sitting there and you never respond to one, that's going to be daunting. Don't do it all at one time. Break it down 10 a day or five a day. Whatever you need to do to get it done, but do it. Define a plan for getting reviews and training your employees to ask for reviews. I'm not saying not using a podium type of software because you know, it makes it easy. It makes it easy for your customer, makes it easy for your staff, but incentivize your staff. Make processes that your staff knows they have to do every time to get those five star reviews. Auditory collection department's attitude. I did not go down that rabbit hole because I didn't think we had time. But your collection staff, you need to hear what they're saying to your customers. Okay? And if one collector gets multiple emails to you from customers or, you know, you hear it all the time. Oh, man, I really hate that collector's calling me. Well, number one, they're avoiding your collector's phone calls. They're not collecting as much money as they can. Number two, they're going to lead to more repos and they're going to lead to bad reviews. So I want you to hear what your collectors are saying to your customers. They're out of line. And call them in. You got to read and study, guys. There's a ton of books which I'm about to go over, but this, you know, some of us aren't, I mean, aren't the happiest people in the world, right? But some of us are. So read, learn, create a process, follow process. Bob Tasman sr. He said you need to decide how you want to go through life dismissing problems, Dismissing that your service department, oh, they do everything right. Or fixing those problems. My service department didn't do something Right, let's fix it. How you choose to look at problems will define in large part how successful you become. Bob Taska is probably the most successful car dealer ever. I would think so. Read and study six books that I would recommend. The top one is the new gold standard. That book is about Ritz Carlson. Has anybody in here stayed at Ritz Carlson? Raise your hand. We're car dealers. Of course we stayed at Ritz Carlson. Get your hands up. So anyway, have you ever been dissatisfied by your stay at Ritz Carlson? Never. And let me tell you, that book goes through it. It's an easy read. It you will be satisfied by Bob Taska quoted him. He was a Ford dealer, a Lincoln dealer. You got to read this book. It is a must for every car dealer. The Go Giver discusses about giving within your community. It's a great book as well. Bob Burke does a podcast as well. I would recommend you listen to that podcast weekly. Great interviews. The sensational salesman is kind of like the Go Giver. Dwayne Cummins. I met this guy, a really cool guy. It's a good book to read. All these are really easy books you should be able to read on the flight home, probably exceeding customer expectations. This is the story of enterprise and the founder of enterprise rental cars. It is a great story. You need to read this book if you have it, if you're in a car business. And the Dream Manager is a new book that I turned on to not long ago. And it's a really good book. It talks about how to keep your customers happy, keep your employees happy and retain your employees. We know what the cost is, not retain your employees. If you have, if you have happy employees, I guarantee you will get 5 stars reviews. And there's my contact information and we have about 10 minutes for questions. Can you explain how you pay for reviews? Very good question. So we've done it multiple ways. So right now it's a tiered system. 1 to 5, 5 star reviews in a month will get you 150 bucks. $150. 6 to 15. 6 to 15 will get you $250. 16 up will get you 300. 300, 350. We had to modify that just a little bit because I have one salesperson, she's a rock star at home and I was paying $25 per review. And one month she got like 50 reviews. Which I'm not saying is not a good thing. It's a great thing. But it was, in my opinion it probably should have. I didn't give her Parameters. And one thing I found about really great salespeople, if you don't give them parameters, they will figure out your pay plan and they will work it to death. So do what makes sense to you. But I think $25 is, you know, for review. If they're getting 10 to 15 is not a bad process. So our pay plan goes, you know, it's slotted flats. If you, you know, if you hit a certain number, you get let's say $175 a car. But then you get the add on. If you sold gaap, you sold extended service contract and a review. So the customer could be the salesperson could end up making close to $300 a car if they hit all the basic back then. Do you have any services that you guys use to drive those reviews sent to communicate with customers, like text messages that you send drives at a seal? We don't. And I'm not saying it's a bad thing, but it built into the process of our closing department. So if you sit in our office in closing, you're asked to leave a review, right? Then not everybody does. You're not going to force people, but you say, hey, I really would love for you to leave a review before you left. If we did our job properly, if we didn't do our job properly, tell us, then we will fix it. Not everybody does it, but a good majority, if our closing person does it the right way, they will get the review. If they don't do it the right way, they won't.

First, namely, I have to tell you that I didn't even know you could respond to it for the review.

Oh really? Okay.

No, I did not know that. So how would you respond? We have only a couple of one stars, but one of them was a review that said I wanted to Test drive the 350Z and they told me I had the over 25, you know, worst experience ever. And another one was they sent me home to get a paycheck stuff. And then when I got back.

I.

Didn'T have a utility bill in my name. And so they wouldn't find out. What a waste of my time.

I mean, how did you.

Because you don't want to sound like combative, argumentative.

No, you want to give your policies and procedures at that point. Customer, I'm really sorry you came in looking at 350C. Unfortunately, our insurance regulations requires a person to be 25 years or older to drive such and such car. You know, that's pretty simple. We won't let someone test Drive a car without filling out kind of that. Okay. And to make sure they can afford that car. But it's all about telling the customer what experience they should see. We had one the other day, you know, the same type of situation where the customer came in and they had a 200,000 mile Jaguar that they thought was worth $4,000. Right. Shocker, shocker. Well, MMR said it was a $200 car. Okay. Well, I knew it wasn't a $200 car, but I also knew it wasn't a $4,000 car. We totaled 1,000 bucks, which I thought was very nice. Well said, hey, this customer bought a car from us for. Didn't buy that jack for us. But we said, hey, you need this, this and this so we can get everything processing. Great. I'm leaving. I'll be back a little bit. Well, they didn't come back. They just left the one star review. So again, I said, hey, I'm very sorry, you know, I'm very sorry the experience you had didn't match what we were supposed to do. You know, we can explain our, we can explain that process. We can explain how we came up with that thousand dollar offer for your car. But you know, it didn't deserve a one star review. But we got one. Make sure you stick to the facts. You give your policies and procedures, and then you don't have anything to feel sorry about because you did your job. You explained it to the customer and you explained to every other customer what you really did. Who cares if that one started new customer ever walks back in the door. What you want to see is that other customers are looking at your reviews, see what your policy and procedures are, that maybe that person didn't follow up. Who else? Yes, sir. Why do you choose to compensate your salespersons when you use Podium or some other service for? I'm sitting less money, less cost. I'd rather give the money to my sales staff. It's that simple. Because I'm thinking I'm probably gonna have to pay my sales staff on top of paying Podium as well. So I think again, I think Podium is a wonderful product, but I think I can develop a process and pay my staff the same amount of money rather than paying Podium. And I think if I pay my staff the same amount of money, I can I get more reward out of that. That's it. But I think if you use Podium, you're gonna probably end up paying your sales staff a little bit more too. You're gonna ask a question. I do.

So the question Is. That's a really good question. It's something that we thought about. But my question to you, Luke, is the quality of the review. What do you think is the quality of reviews coming from the experience they had the sales staff and from that sales staff asking them versus them?

That's a good point. I thought about that. But I think that you will see that the reviews that are essentially every time a customer leaves your product, they get this text and they're leaving you a review. I think that, I think that you will get plenty of five star reviews. I just don't know that those five star reviews will talk about the sales staff and the experience they have with that sales staff. So I think that might be a difference as well. We have people walk in our dealership every day that say I want to speak to Isaac or I want to speak to Serena because I saw their reviews online. So I think they're probably just a different quality. I do. What do you know? Responding to a five star review changes the SEO that helps. It affects it. I don't know that answer. The question was, does responding to the review help your SEO? That's probably a question for Google and they may not even know that answer. What it does is this. It knows that it allows other customers to know that you care. So if you just get all these five star reviews and you're not responding well, you know, if I'm looking at that, I go, huh, that's a little weird that the company didn't care enough to respond to those reviews. That's what I would say. Are you shifting gears more towards social media as far as your users, Are you still focusing primarily on Google? I would argue that Google is social media. Maybe not. Maybe not to the level of Facebook. We get tons of Facebook reviews as well. Recommendations, not reviews anymore. I don't know. I don't know how much longer Facebook is going to be a dominant force in social media. Would be kind of an argument I would have there and I'd rather have. I don't think Google's going anywhere and I think it matters more there, honestly. I think Google is your number one search engine followed by YouTube, which is owned by Google is your second major search engine. So if a customer is searching, they don't. I don't even know how to search on Facebook. If I was searching something, I wouldn't have a clue. But I do know how to open my Google app and type in best restaurant near the near me. I know how to do that. So I think, I think you get More bang for your buck from Google, honestly, than the review anybody else. We've had a couple reviews where people don't even buy a car from us and we'll leave a nasty review. And where I'm like, you have the wrong dealership. And they'll say, we'll talk about warranty and we'll get a Pensacola warranty car. Spots like that, we get that too. Probably in the last year or two. Unfortunately, competitors do things like that sometimes, okay? And unfortunately, people get in the wrong place sometimes. What we do is this, Mr. Business Customer. We look through all of our logs, we log, everybody walks on our lot. We don't have any record of you being here, but if this is the experience you got from us, we're sorry. Here's my email address. Please contact me immediately. And then you get the ones who are just one star said, that's it. There's no reasoning. They just click the one star and they go on about their business. And it's the thing that you don't know what it is. If I get somebody who gives a one star and they don't have any response or they didn't type out anything, just click one star. This is what we do. We go, hey, we're so sorry that you felt like you needed to give us a one star review. But we cannot improve our processes and fix the problem that you experience unless you tell us why. And that makes it. There's a reasoning behind that. You want to show that you care. That's all it's about. It's about showing every customer that looks at that review that you care enough to respond and you care enough to try to fix the process that you messed up. Yes, ma'. Am.

I'm going to feed off of that because I know exactly where he's coming from. So those are conversations I never take offline. I rectify it. I'm really sorry. We keep a law. If every customer that walks through the door, you must have the wrong dealership. I just call it out there. I don't take on that burden. For a one star review for somebody.

Yeah, that's for 100%. You're gonna, you're gonna get reviewed wrong sometimes. And it may go to the five star side or may go to one star side. You're gonna get those reviews. And by the way, I didn't go over this, but a three star review and a four star review is not a bad thing. Okay? Alexa gets all in a tizzy sometimes. Heck, that's relentless. A four star review, well that's okay. It shows realness, you know, because every customer. There are some customers that no matter what you do, you're not gonna get a five star. You're not going to. Do you have a question?

Yeah, I was just wondering. So we don't foster reviews at all in my. My where sponsorship. My main salesperson, she. Yeah, but what about six months from now when they. When they made four out of their first eight payments? We repossess them and they know the reviews are part of us and they go and give us a battery because they know that. Ask them, you know, I hope you.

Have a good experience.

Please give us a good review. And I. I feel like everybody that leaves the door pre. Has had a good experience, but they might not have had a good experience three months down or six months down.

And I. Yes, but that can happen anywhere. I mean, you know, we're selling cars. Don't worry about that. Don't worry about that one bit more.

Good reviews than to worry about someone later. Just gr.

And I will probably resist 70 cars. A shit. Something like that. Okay, maybe 80. Every single one of those customers. Not every single one, but I. I think our review Penetration is probably 70%. 60 to 70%, you think? I mean, we don't. That one I had up there is one that's changed every view from a five star to one star because we repossessed it. So I don't think it's a. I don't think it's a legitimate insert if you're taking care of the customer. Customers who have their cars repossessed typically know why they got their cars repossessed. Sometimes they don't, but. But a lot of times they do. One more question, baby. Anybody? Well, thank y' all so much. I really appreciate y' all being in. Sa.