Before I continue, allow me to quickly explain why dealership reviews are important to our store and to you (those of you who've kept pace with my blogs, feel free to skip to paragraph three!). To our dealership, reviews are like a storefront's giant glass window. This window is our only way to capture folks that don't already know about us when window shopping across the World Wide Web, but even better than a window that shows what we're peddling it shows what others think of us. I don't know about you, but I trust my friend Jim's ideas of Harley D's restaurant a lot more than I do the proprietor of the place. This of course brings me to why it's important to you and it's in fact that same reason. Do you trust the guy trying to sell you the steak, or the guy that ate the steak and told you how yummy it was?
To get back on track, we've long since heard complaints that DealerRater's policies are too stringent which, in DealerRater's defense, it has to be. Folks sometimes don't want to sign up for an account, submit their email address, rate us throughout several areas, then write another 250 character review--even though it's not as much as the high number would lead you to believe--and they don't always like that after you've submitted this time and energy you have to then await a response from DealerRater to prove you're a real person, only to finally submit the review once and for all.
So again, though this is all put in place to keep fraudulent reviews from coming to the store's aforementioned web-window, it doesn't mean it turns some folks off. And if you are one of these people, you're in luck.
We've recently signed up with several review companies, 11 different ones in fact including DealerRater, which gives you a much better array of choice with regards to your review of our store. Do you have a Gmail account, Google account, or You Tube account? Then why not leave a review for Handy Toyota on Google Local? Do you only want to click the five stars (because let's face it folks, we never do less than five-star-quality work, right *wink*)? Then allow me to point you to Google Local once more, where you only have to click one through five stars, at which point you can opt to write a review of any length: one character or 5,000, it's your choice.
Do you not have any of these Google accounts? That's okay too! You're probably one of the 500 million or more Facebook users and you can go to InsiderPages.com and use your existing Facebook account to write a review! Once you're at Insider Pages the same rules apply as to Google Local: rate us by stars and call it quits, or let the world know in your own words--at any length--what else you have to say. The choice is yours.
Speaking of choice, here's a list of available review websites that you can peruse at your leisure:
- Google Local
- Edmunds
- Yahoo Local
- DealerRater
- Super Pages
- Insider Pages
- Merchant Circle
- City Search
- Local
- Yelp
- Judy's Book
- Yellow Pages
Because that's really what I'm trying to get across to you today is that you have a choice. We initially stuck with DealerRater because we felt it was the most progressive in terms of keeping erroneous or fake reviews from watering down the validity of the site in question, but when we hear consistently that "I'd of loved to write a review, but DealerRater was too strict," well it goes back to that time tested adage: the customer is always right. And hopefully you've learned that at Handy Toyota we believe in that saying to the bitter end.
Chris Dugan
Handy Toyota
cdugan@handycars.com
Comments
First, allow me to thank you for reading our blog and taking the time to post a comment! As the writer of a number of the blogs and the active publisher, it's nice to know our content is being read and hopefully shedding some light on some of the issues involved (perhaps once in a while at least!).
As for your comment, as the blog implies this is one of the reasons we've opened our doors to new review venues such as Google Local, Yahoo! Local, Insider Pages, and so on. We wanted to give our customers a better set of options with regards to where they post their reviews, and thus the new system.
Since you dislike the DealerRater system, why don?t you try using Google or one of the other review sites which you can find at www.reviewhandytoyota.com? They are all great sites, and Google for example does allow for business owners to dispute reviews and get them removed (if slanderous or malicious content is posted of course).
Let me know if you would like to know more by emailing me at cdugan@handycars.com, and again, a sincere thanks for your comment!