Reviews have become an increasingly important part of the car buying journey with JudgeService identifying that 75% of customers want to read dealer reviews before committing to a purchase, rising to 95% for younger buyers. AM caught up with Neil Addley, managing director of JudgeService, and discusses how dealerships can improve their customer service.
You’re planning your next State of the Nation survey – what insights do you expect it to uncover?
We started doing this just after COVID to really try and understand how consumers were viewing the world and we carried on doing it. What I imagine will continue this year is a gradual reluctance to go diesel. Petrol is having a bit of renaissance, the gradual adoption of electric cars and a reduction in the perceived barriers to electric whether it’s range anxiety or concerns about whether the car is too expensive. Essentially, it allows us to understand the dynamics, but also things around customer inquiries – where people are likely to enquire for a new or used car, or indeed, servicing, and how they want to do that now, because that changes over time.
JudgeService has been a leader in customer service and reviews for 14 years. What’s the key to staying ahead in such a competitive space?
It’s about listening to clients and also keeping up in terms of current affairs, both in the business world, but also in tech. You should also always be on the lookout for feedback, whether it’s from your team or your clients or from what’s going on in the real world. AI would be an example where really it’s the tech world that makes you think, right, what are we going to do? How could we apply that?
I’m particularly pleased with how our team listens to our clients. They then come up with something for one client, and then if the client really likes it, then we spread it around all our clients. That’s an organic way of introducing innovation and ideas that helps you to stay ahead. You can also do it deliberately. We hold quite regular team sessions where we’ll brainstorm how we could improve. We’ll sit down and talk about what the clients might want, then we’ll talk to the client. We’ll get everyone back together and mock up what we think we want, and that does help us to stay ahead – not just delivering the core service but adding value beyond that. In fact, the more demanding a client is, the better, because they push you to push the boundaries of what you can deliver.
What are some of your latest developments?
In the last six months, we rolled out a new dashboard to clients, which gives them a lot more information in one place. That was quite a big development. The dashboard gives dealers more visibility of how they’re performing and also how their competitors are performing, with each other or at individual sites so it allows you to focus. More directly related to profit is that we allow you to set KPIs and we work with our clients working on what those KPIs should be – usually around things that we know drive profitability or retention. We’re also working on a project where, if you dip below a KPI, then you’ll get an alert.
The other one is the introduction of AI with AI Reply which replies to reviews or recommends what replies to send and we’ll use it increasingly in our reporting. We’re working on a project around AI Voice as well, which will improve efficiencies. AI is probably as powerful a change as we’ve seen since we got the internet and since we all got proper broadband, rather than dial-up modems, because that increased what you could do so much. At AM Live last year, I asked the audience whether they used AI in terms of ChatGPT or whatever, and I think 95% of people put their hand up. What’s happening now is we’re seeing applications for it being developed across the industry, and I do think it can improve both efficiency and customer service. With our own example – AI Reply – we’ve got the stats that show that people are replying a lot quicker to reviews so it’s more than finding the time to do them, AI is generating better quality than those produced by a human using a template. AI is able to go in and read what the person’s name or who the dealer-facing salesperson was, what car it was, and personalise it more than a human being would have the time to do.
How do score-based alerts support dealer profits and online review scores?
Dealership managers have a lot of things to do: for manufacturers; with stuff to do for head office. I think Robert Forrester said that Vertu has 60 odd systems within the business. That’s a lot of logging-in going on. What we find is that if we provide alerts when scores dip on a KPI, or when we provide a feedback email saying a customer isn’t happy, then people respond to those quite quickly, because they go into their inbox and they deal with then. Alerts make it easy for people to spot relevant data and act on it, which in turn, drives activity, which drives profitability.
When we launched Judgeservice, 14 years ago, Ford and Vauxhall were still in a pretty dominant position in terms of market leadership, and they, at the time, used a seven-point Likert scale so we did the same. But the world’s evolved since then, and more people are used to using five-star reviews, whether that’s on Google or Amazon. So, rather than being a little bit out of step, we thought it was now was the time to translate across five points. We converted all the old scores as well so you now have a five-point Likert scale and also the promoter score.
You talk about creating ‘raving fans’ – what does that mean in practice?
It was from a book I read when I was in dealer land, actually, probably with CD Brammall, and it was called Raving Fans and it resonated with me. A technical definition of a raving fan is a net promoter, so someone who gives a nine out of 10 on a score. I’ve always thought if you could get people to be as enthusiastic about their dealer and their car as they could about their football team then you’re on to a winner. It’s about getting people to actually extol the virtues of your business. So, a ‘raving fan’ will not just buy from you. They’ll tell people about you. They’ll leave you good reviews, they might even defend you if someone’s critical, and at the end of the day, they’ll buy from you out of choice, rather than just on price.
One of my hobby horses is post-delivery contact. Most dealers – when we first start working with them – will score around 40 to 45% of customers being contacted, and we focus on that. We help them measure it, obviously, and then most will get to 70%-80% within a few months. The same is true with service plans. Groups will be offering service plans between 40%-50% of the time, perhaps because the incentives are not right for the salesperson. Tweak that a bit, make it an area of focus – a KPI – and you can start to offer more service plans. And we know that every time you offer two customers a service plan, one of them will take it, which all helps to drive profitability.
How do profit and customer service work together, rather than being at odds?
Overall, I’d say that long-term profit has always been linked to customer satisfaction. Sales sells the first car, service sells the second, and so on. So that cycle is based on people liking doing business with you. People also actually like being upsold things like service plans. If you look after a customer and they have a good experience, then they don’t mind spending extra money on things that will add value to their ownership experience.