Widewail, a customer review and reputation management solution, released the 2023 Widewail Voice of the Customer Report Dec. 19, which studies the voice of today’s automotive customer by compiling U.S. new car dealerships’ Google reviews from the first half of 2023. An analysis of 800,000 Google reviews from more than 16,000 new car dealerships found that 25% of customers who left a review after purchasing a car from a direct-to-consumer electric vehicle (EV) company, such as Tesla or Rivian, left a one-star review. 14% of customers who purchased an EV from a traditional car dealership left a one-star review. The auto industry average benchmark is dealerships having 7% of their reviews be one star, so the high volume of negative reviews raises concern about the experience of buying and owning an EV.

Positive experiences with staff are the most predictive of a positive review outcome. 

• Customers value staff who are helpful, friendly and professional. Most positive reviews of the sales department mention a staff member by name who met those criteria.
• Nearly 80% of all reviews mention staff and 70% of those reviews are positive.
• 57% of positive reviews mention individual team members. The experience customers have with a specific staff member at a dealership is the most commonly mentioned category in Google reviews and has the leading influence on positive reviews.
• Most positive reviews of the service department mention a good experience with a specific staff member, an effective vehicle repair, and a moment when wait times met expectations.
• Experience with staff is 12x more predictive of a positive outcome than other dealership topics, like inventory, loaner car or valet.
• Experience with staff is 5.2x more predictive of a positive outcome than pricing topics such as cost, warranty and deals.

The negative review analysis found that poor communication is mentioned 37% of the time, making it a leading contributing factor to negative reviews. Negative reviews also cite wait time as an issue, mentioning it 3.1 times more often in negative versus positive reviews.

• Most negative reviews mention poor communication, the service department, unsatisfactory or expensive repairs, long wait times, and price surprises.
• Price concerns are almost five times more common among unhappy customers than happy customers, likely because of a lack of predictability in costs associated with the service department.
• While customers mention pricing in 20.7% of negative reviews, price is mentioned even more often in reviews about a specific service experience, such as brakes, engine and transmission repairs.
• Negative reviews average 100 words while positive reviews average just 33 words. Negative reviews have a higher density of topic-specific mentions, explaining in greater detail the problems encountered.