Hyundai Lifting Veil of Secrecy on Dealer Reviews
While some of the brand’s U.S. dealers were reluctant to be reviewed publicly, Hyundai says the immediacy of the process and ability to correct mistakes makes website partnership a winner.
December 9, 2013
SUPERIOR TOWNSHIP, MI – Hyundai says more than half of its 826 U.S. dealers have opted to be reviewed publicly via website SureCritic.com and expects 70%-80% dealer participation in the next couple months.
The Korean brand has partnered with the third-party site to lift the veil of secrecy on dealer reviews, and to speed up and open lines of communication between customers and dealers.
Some 451 Hyundai dealers have enrolled in the SureCritic process, and 426 were active as of late November.
“More dealers than we expected have realized this is the reality,” Barry Ratzlaff, executive director-customer connected services for Hyundai Motor America, says of publicly viewable satisfaction ratings, which are prevalent thanks to Amazon.com and Yelp.com.
However, with some reviews on those two websites revealed this year to have been faked, Hyundai dealers initially were skittish about publicly viewable, Web-based reviews. Mainly they feared competing dealers could post fraudulent analysis, HMA CEO John Krafcik says.
“You can imagine dealers feeling somewhat reticent about this,” Krafcik says. “(But SureCritic reviews) can’t be bogus. It can’t be people from the Chevrolet store across the street writing reviews about Hyundai.”
SureCritic, founded in 2010 in Seattle, prides itself on verifying identities of those who rate stores on its website, which at this point is exclusively auto-oriented.
Whereas Hyundai typically has surveyed customers about their dealership experience by direct mail, well after service is performed, the new process is much more immediate.
Hyundai downloads the repair order from the dealership on the day a customer’s vehicle is serviced, then emails a survey request to the customer. The survey includes a link to the SureCritic website and a second survey, with four brief questions.
“(The old) process can work and still has a role, but (it) takes a lot of time and effort and we lose some of the customer personalization with the amount of time it takes to process (the results),” Ratzlaff says. “So we were looking for a better way.”
Hyundai is promoting to dealers the immediate feedback provided by the SureCritic process, as well as the ability to correct a problem if the customer isn’t satisfied with his service.
“They have the chance to solve a negative review before it gets posted,” says Ratzlaff.
A negative review still will be revealed, but dealers have the opportunity to fix the problem ahead of the public posting, and customers then can “re-score” the dealer after an attempt to solve the issue is made.
Customers are asked to score their dealership experience on a scale of one to five stars.
As an example, a 1-star review Sept. 9 of poor service on an ’11 Hyundai Elantra by Crain Hyundai in Springdale, AR, yielded a response from a customer-relations manager the next day. The original poster revised his review to a 5-star rating based on the dealer staffer’s quick response, although the problem never was disclosed or said to be solved.
“We investigated several tools, and at the end of the day we liked the SureCritic tool for its simplicity,” Ratzlaff says. “And that re-score process was right on target with what the dealers needed.”
However, dealers don’t always respond to customer complaints.
WardsAuto found two reviews of Dearborn, MI-based LaFontaine Hyundai that were critical and yielded no feedback from store staff.
While some dealers may not like negative reviews being available for all to see, Ratzlaff says transparency is critical to this new process, calling overwhelmingly positive reviews “just a promotional tool. If you see a website full of glowing reviews, do you believe it?”
Hyundai invested an unspecified amount of money in developing a personalized SureCritic user interface. It began testing the SureCritic reviews in the third and fourth quarters of 2012 with 10 of its 21 dealer-council members’ dealerships participating.
Ratzlaff says Hyundai is neither forcing dealers to use SureCritic nor incentivizing those that do.
It hopes to improve the process in the future by allowing customers to directly go to the website without first receiving an email invitation.
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