Introducing: 2023 Voice of the Customer Report

The Widewail team is proud to announce the publication of our first annual Voice of the Customer Report. For this report, we analyzed the topics in and sentiment of 800,000 Google reviews from the Widewail Automotive Reputation Index to isolate what actually compels dealership customers to leave a good or bad review.

The VOC Report uncovers why staff are the leading driver of reviews, the top factors influencing negative reviews, and how service departments can improve. In a special Electric Vehicle segment, we learn why EV customers aren’t as happy as the average customer and why DTC EV customers' reviews have the lowest sentiment of all. 

The report’s findings are distilled into digestible insights and filled with advice on maximizing positive reviews and minimizing negatives. Any GM, dealership digital manager or local business marketer can use it as a foundation for reputation and business strategy in 2024.

Report Highlights:

• The #1 driver of positive reviews is staff
• Poor communication in the service department is the top issue in negative reviews 
• Price is not a substantial driver of positive reviews, only mentioned 4.37% of the time.
• The average rating of reviews mentioning EVs was 4.30, lower than the industry benchmark
• Tesla’s negative review percentage is high at 32.5%, worse than average of 10%

→ All the dealerships we analyzed for this report are included in the Widewail Automotive Reputation Index, a comprehensive reputation dataset. It's free, so please try it out.

→ Keep an eye out for our upcoming report: the Widewail Brand Scorecard. We rank all OEM brands by key reputation metrics–it will be an eye-opener for dealers.

→ Subscribe to The REV newsletter for our best automotive reputation insights sourced from the Widewail Automotive Reputation Index