A website was brought to my attention yesterday that screamed to be talked about.
The website is this: www.ackermantoyotasucks.com
A quick glance of the content will tell you how damaging this website is for this dealership. I guarantee that people see it. I guarantee that there have been potential buyers that have seen it.
Here’s why:
This is PAGE ONE of a Google Search resulting from the search terms “Ackerman Toyota”. The first two organic results are the dealership’s website. The third one is.. you guessed it.. our lovely.. uh.. tribute website.
I drilled down a little into the message board thread and read into the
customer’s complaint a little to see if there was any effort on the
dealer’s part to rectify this and/or could the dealer have done
something about it. The dealer always has a choice on how to handle a customer issue
especially on a new car purchase, in my opinion.
The customer’s complaint seems to be that the a window screeches when being rolled down on his newly purchased Scion.
It seems they blame the window tint job that the customer had done on the vehicle for the issue while the customer claims it had something to do with some stuff they installed prior to delivery.
The message board thread appears to have been contained within a forum
that the dealership was affiliated with in some way and the dealership
did interact, within the message board, with the consumer. They also
seem to have, at one point, called the customer and talked to him. In
the end, they had the message board thread deleted (probably due to
their affiliation with this forum) but not before the customer could
preserve it in all of its glory.
Anyways, I’m not trying to take sides here. I don’t know what happened but I know one thing, a potential customer won’t dissect this situation near as much as I tried to.
All they’ll see is … Ackerman Toyota Sucks, a complaint, and links to other negative reviews on other dealer review sites… including the dealership’s Yahoo business listing and dealerrater.
This customer obviously has a vendetta against this dealer. I’m sure the customer created this website out of anger, frustration and, probably, revenge. It was pretty much created immediately upon the conclusion of
the message board thread.
This website has been around since 2007 and still has the optimization to show on Page One as the third organic result.
In my opinion, typically the truth lies somewhere in between both sides of any story. Even if the customer was completely in the wrong, which I doubt, as a dealer, my interest would lie more in what can I do to get this website removed, than in who was right and who was wrong.
A “screeching” window doesn’t sound like a big deal to me. I’ve sold cars that had this issue. I’ve had customers who’ve had this issue. I cannot think of a single time, on a new car purchase, where the issue wasn’t fixed for the customer if only to preserve our beloved surveys and CSI.
Whether the dealer could use legal methods to remove this website or not, they obviously didn’t (or couldn’t) as this website has existed for more than 3 years. With Toyota’s current campaign of domain “repossession”, you’d think the dealer would be jumping at the opportunity to bring this to the OEM’s attention and let them handle the website’s removal.
I know if I were the dealer, it’d be worth it for me to fix the window issue and make the customer happy in exchange for removing this website.
You might be under the impression that dealer reviews on dealerrater and such (not even including this website tribute) don’t make much of a difference but I guarantee you that potential customers will believe these reviews more than they’ll believe you.
The customer doesn’t even have to search for reviews of the dealership
to find this.
All they have to do is search and that’s the one thing
that every internet shopper does.
