REV #079: The Financial Impact of a Good Experience (And the Data Behind It)

Welcome to the REV. A weekly briefing on what the Auto industry can learn about customer experience from millions of Google reviews. Every Thursday, we Rank, Explore & Visualize automotive reputation & sentiment data.
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RANK: Which Staff Behaviors Show Up in Dollars per RO

As part of the Customer Clarity launch, we have begun to connect DMS data and customer feedback. With this, we can start to align the reality on the ground with the resulting customer perception. As an initial experiment, we matched six months of reviews against the customer-pay repair-order revenue behind them.

Finding: clear communication is positively correlated with dollars per RO.

Put another way, when we compared how often communication is discussed in positive reviews for the typical dealer (median) vs. the top 25% of dealers, we found the top 25% make $170 more per RO off a $578 average ticket. That's 29% more. When we split by segment, the dollar difference is about $120 for luxury and $40 for mass market, which follows the logic you would expect.

As Brian Benstock puts it, dealers have three ways to grow:

1. Sell more
2. Sell more per ticket
3. Sell more in 24 hours

Our early research suggests top-tier communication in fixed ops is positively correlated with number 2, sell more per ticket. Customer Clarity makes this insight possible. As that product matures, I'll do more research connecting operational reality to customer perception. See Customer Clarity.

EXPLORE: Independents Are Everywhere in AEO

Ask where to service a Toyota on Gemini or ChatGPT, and you'd expect an answer full of Toyota dealers. The brand word is supposed to work like a credential. The franchise store has the scan tool, the warranty authority and the sign out front.

I ran that question in four California cities, eight brands each. What I found is concerning.

1. For each brand-specific search, independent alternatives were awarded their own section.
2. Worse, the same independent shops show up across multiple brands, as shown in the image above. The example shop in Fremont showed up in results for all eight brands I researched, a mix of mass market and luxury.

AEO is not SEO. It seems more like an even playing field, which is code for defection risk.

VISUALIZE: Share of Voice, 33% of the Ecosystem and 70% of the Activity

A thank you to those who joined us in Kansas City at NCM to go over this research in person.

I explored Widewail's performance in the Lexus network and came across this stat. There are 6 Lexus dealerships on Long Island in NY; we work with 2 (33%), but produce 70% of all Lexus reviews on Long Island each month. 33% of the ecosystem and 70% of the activity. That is what good looks like.

If you want to get more reviews to support AEO, check out Widewail's Signal products.

Six months of reviews at 362 franchise dealerships matched to their repair-order revenue, insurance and warranty ROs excluded. Correlation, not cause. Review data from the Widewail Index.

See you next week - Jake