Cer­ti­fied Benz and Beemer of Scotts­dale, AZ, is one of the top inde­pen­dent auto deal­ers in the coun­try, with sales of approx­i­mate­ly 120 vehi­cles per month out of its 47,000 square-foot facil­i­ty. Accord­ing to own­er Jack Schnei­der, in June of 2010, while doing well in sales, the deal­er­ship was doing noth­ing about “online rep­u­ta­tion man­age­ment” – an online search revealed two neg­a­tive reviews and lit­tle else. “We real­ized we had to improve our online rep­u­ta­tion. We had so many hap­py cus­tomers but only bad reviews.  With the increase in buy­ers con­duct­ing online research, it became clear that we should have our hap­py cus­tomers post tes­ti­mo­ni­als,” Schnei­der stat­ed.

To help launch the pro­gram and make rep­u­ta­tion man­age­ment part of the cul­ture of the entire deal­er­ship, Cer­ti­fied Benz and Beemer made it the focus of each week­ly sales meet­ing. Con­tests were held and the staff was reward­ed with par­ties for mile­stones such as gath­er­ing an addi­tion­al 100 new reviews. The deal­er­ship also uti­lized DealerRater’s email tem­plates to fol­low up with cus­tomers and encour­age them to review the deal­er­ship online.

Cer­ti­fied Benz and Beemer com­plete­ly inte­grat­ed Deal­er­Rater online reviews into the sales process. A three-ring binder sits in the sales office full of cus­tomer tes­ti­mo­ni­als. The cus­tomer can flip through it while wait­ing or the sales­per­son can review with the cus­tomer to help close the sale.

In addi­tion, links have been built into every salesperson’s email sig­na­ture with a tem­plate stress­ing what makes the deal­er­ship dif­fer­ent, ask­ing the cus­tomer to vis­it DealerRater.com and rate both the deal­er­ship and the indi­vid­ual sales­per­son.

“Deal­er­Rater has real­ly helped instill our cus­tomer ser­vice cul­ture through­out the deal­er­ship. Every­one under­stands that we are striv­ing for as close to per­fec­tion as pos­si­ble. With Deal­er­Rater we now also have our cus­tomers telling oth­er cus­tomers what they have been through. It’s a real sales boost­er,” said Schnei­der.

Deal­er­Rater attracts more than 8 mil­lion con­sumers every year who vis­it the site to search for car deal­er­ships, read cur­rent reviews, write their own descrip­tive reviews, and find car deals – all for free. For more infor­ma­tion call 800–266-9455, or vis­it Deal­er­Rater today!