For many consumers, the most important purchasing decision they’ll make in any given year is which car to buy. A car is naturally a driver’s prized possession, so drivers are always willing to put in the research to figure out which car to buy and which dealer to buy from. This often means they’ll be looking at your CARFAX reviews before making any decisions.
These days, car buyers spend over 60% of their time researching and shopping online—especially from third-party sites. This significantly exceeds the amount of time that they spend speaking to staff at your dealership, driving home one major point: online reputation management matters.
When you use CARFAX dealer reviews and vehicle history reports wisely, you can add an extra tool to your arsenal that drives customers to your dealership.
Leverage CARFAX Reviews with Podium to Gain Leads and Sell Better
Of course, that’s not all. Is CARFAX reliable in getting you reviews? Absolutely. Is CARFAX worth it? Yes. But you can make it work for you even more when you use tools such as Podium.
Podium helps you manage and collect your reviews holistically, allowing you to get the most you can out of CARFAX reviews as well as other platforms. First, we’ll chat through the basics of CARFAX. Then, we’ll get into the details of how Podium can take your CARFAX usage to the next level.
What is CARFAX?
CARFAX is a used car listing website that’s best known for offering trusted vehicle history reports to any consumer in the market for a car or any dealer who wants to acquire the right vehicles for their inventory. All you need to do is provide the vehicle identification number (VIN) of the car in question and pay for a single report or pay a discounted bulk fee.
These CARFAX reports inform stakeholders of any major accidents or structural damage the car may have experienced as well as listing previous owners. With information compiled from insurance companies, police reports, body shops, and more, these reports can even protect you from total losses, junked cars, and odometer rollback scams that affect more than 450,000 car sales each year.
CARFAX’s thorough database—which includes 22 billion records from over 100,000 sources in the U.S. and Canada—is one of many reasons car buyers have immense confidence in the site’s accuracy. Because of this, dealerships that gain CARFAX’s seal of approval can quickly become buyers’ preferred location for car buying and maintenance.
How does CARFAX work?
As a dealer, providing CARFAX reports upfront for vehicles in your inventory can be the first step to building consumer trust. By showing transparency about a vehicle’s history, including past accidents and reported repairs, you’re actually more likely to make a sale for high-priced items like cars. As much as 73% of consumers will pay more for products when total transparency is provided.
CARFAX for Dealers is a platform that allows business subscribers to access and save unlimited CARFAX vehicle reports. When you gain access to the platform, your business automatically becomes a trusted CARFAX dealership. This allows you to:
- Get your used cars listed on carfax.com
- Get your dealership listed on the CARFAX dealers search tool
- Increase your dealership service center’s visibility by listing and linking back to it on carfax.com
- Build customer loyalty by allowing users to track their mileage, oil change needs, and more on their CARFAX account
Beyond these primary features, CARFAX for Dealers also gives you the chance to let your customers do the marketing for you. After they’ve bought a car or completed a service appointment at your dealership, your customer can leave reviews that other car shoppers will read.
What are CARFAX reviews?
As soon as you’re listed on the CARFAX website, you’ll have a dealership profile that any verified customers can review. As potential customers scroll through dealerships that sell their desired car make, the dealers that stand out the most will be the ones with the highest volume of positive reviews.
With nearly 60% of consumers choosing dealerships based on reputation during the car buying process, gathering the best CARFAX dealer reviews will encourage more people to shop at your location.
Still, CARFAX reviews aren’t the ultimate source customers use to determine a dealership’s trustworthiness. Rather, customers often use a compilation of auto dealership review sites, including Google, Yelp, and Cars.com, to decide on the first place they visit. While CARFAX for Dealers is an incredibly useful car history checking tool and a great platform for marketing your used cars and service department, it’s critical to focus on your overall online reputation, too.
Build Trust with Reviews
An important part of managing your reputation—both online and offline—is working with your team to provide the highest quality experience possible. For many dealerships, this means streamlining operations into one tool.
Podium Reviews is a tool that lets you send review invites for Google, Cars.com, CARFAX, and more to help you collect hundreds of ratings. When used in place of or in tandem with CARFAX reports, this tool can help you become customers’ preferred dealership in a number of ways.
1. Increase your credibility
Getting positive reviews on a wide variety of platforms helps you become a trusted, credible leader in the auto industry. With Reviews, you can use a single platform to gather reviews on websites that consumers trust most when looking for dealerships, including CARFAX.
When 90% of consumers will only visit a business after reading online reviews, it’s critical that you keep up your online reputation. It’s the best way to make sure they choose your dealership and trust your employees when the sales process begins.
Getting more reviews on credible websites in your industry will also help you rank at the top of local search results, driving more potential customers to learn about and visit your dealership.
2. Never miss an interaction
With the consolidation of all your reviews into a single platform, you’ll never worry about leaving a customer hanging. You’ll be able to track all incoming reviews right on Podium Reviews, which makes you better equipped to handle negative reviewers and thank positive reviewers on a timely basis.
Plus, you’ll save the time you’d normally waste flipping between Google Business Profile, Facebook, and industry-specific websites. Instead, you’ll just scroll down on a single screen to respond to communications you’re assigned to.
3. Get the data
As the reviews start rolling in, Reviews will give you a comprehensive overview of how much customer feedback you’re getting and which sites it’s coming from. This will help you determine which platforms your customers are using as well as where you have the most opportunity for growth.
You’ll get a better idea of how your actual business—not just your online reputation—is doing, too. Reviews showcases all of your reviewers’ insight into your customer service, prices, and more on a single platform so you can promote your strengths and act on your weaknesses faster.
4. Keep it personal
With Reviews, you can link to your CRM, using customer history and data to carefully personalize each review invite and response. This increases your chances of collecting a review when you send an invite and helps your customers feel like you know them.
Hey Sarah, thanks for coming in! We’re so glad we were able to help you find the right Kia for Mother’s Day. Would you mind taking 30 sec to leave us a review? http://leavereview123.com
5. Automate
There is a time and place to ask for a review–the moment when your customer is most satisfied with the service or product you’ve provided. While you should always set expectations for reviews in person, Podium Reviews allows you to animate your send schedule, ensuring you send a review invite at the right touchpoint, every time.
It also alerts you when a new review is written and can auto respond to reviews as well, lightening the load on your team and improving your response times.
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Smooth communications deliver the best results for your business. Working with your team to demonstrate expertise, keep your car listings updated, and respond as fast as possible to every message will quickly increase customer confidence in your dealership. Paired with a vehicle history report service like CARFAX, Podium Reviews can help you build your reputation both online and offline.
Ready to level up? We’re here to help. Learn more about how Podium Reviews can fit into and streamline your operations, as well as build trust for your dealership, by watching a demo today.
