The epiphany that launched Ed Napleton Automotive Group’s customer experience program came during the 2023 annual review meeting in Palm Springs, Calif.
In was there that newly installed national CX director Eduardo Rodriguez saw a demonstration of Reputation’s customer journey tool, with its color-coded visual display, and he instantly knew he’d found what he was looking for.
“He ran from the back of the room to the front, and was just like, ‘This!’ ” recalled Reputation senior account executive and director of large dealership groups, who had just taken over the Napleton account. “I’m like, ‘I think we’ve got a winner here.’”
“I remember that meeting so well,” Rodriguez said. “We had somebody on from Germany, I think it was. Amazing data analysis, and he had put together this beautiful display. That display is something I now use on a daily basis.
“Every day, I’m checking for those shades of orange. Are we green? Are we yellow? We’re definitely not going to be red. Where do we need to focus our attention? Whether you want to call it AI or machine learning, that’s the tool we use to help us guide our decisions.”
Those decisions have worked out well. Since the beginning of 2024, according to a recent case study, the average star rating among the thousands of Google reviews submitted annually by customers of Napleton’s 63 dealership locations in Illinois, Indiana, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Pennsylvania and Florida has gone from 4.6 to 4.7 — and it’s still rising. Review penetration has increased.
And Napleton now boasts a 99% review response rate groupwide and has increased its review.
Things are going so well that one Napleton dealership was recently audited by Google because of its large number of positive reviews. Google’s algorithm flags businesses — especially in automotive — whose reviews are at or near 100% positive as suspicious.
“It took about two weeks before Google then released the store back to us where we can manage it again. God bless Google,” Rodriguez said with a laugh. “But they found there were no issues. Nothing fraudulent, no fake reviews.”
Not so long ago, though, too many good reviews wasn’t the problem.
When Rodriguez moved from fixed ops into the customer experience role in 2023, he wasn’t exactly thrilled with what he found.
The company was flooded with data from reviews, surveys and social media, but there was no structure and no direction, Rodriguez said. Instead of providing insight it was causing confusion.
“In the dealership, unfortunately, we don’t have the time to dissect and really dial in on every single customer comment,” he said. “There’s just too much. It’s a fire hose."
The negative review percentage wasn’t overwhelming, though at 8% it was higher than the company’s goals. But Rodriguez noted those bad reviews were repeating themselves.
“It was just the same issues over and over again,” he said. “At least it felt that way. And we really weren’t gaining traction. We weren’t getting more positive reviews. Our CSI wasn’t doing so hot.
“Every day, I’m checking for those shades of orange. Are we green? Are we yellow? We’re definitely not going to be red. Where do we need to focus our attention? Whether you want to call it AI or machine learning, that’s the tool we use to help us guide our decisions.”
– EDUARDO RODRIGUEZ, Ed Napleton Automotive Group
“So we hit the panic button. And ownership bought in. And they are fully invested.” Which is where Reputation comes in.
Once he saw the light in Palm Springs, Rodriguez went right to work on incorporating the tool into a data-driven CX program for all Napleton stores.
The program includes daily pulse checks at the dealership level to review feedback from the previous 24 hours provided by the technology, allowing managers to give their staff immediate coaching, as well as “deep dives” at the corporate level looking for patterns occurring at multiple locations.
That information not only allowed dealership general managers to target areas of improvement in their stores, it showed Rodriguez problems that were popping up throughout the group that needed to be addressed.
One of the first issues identified by Napleton’s partnership with Reputation was that customers were calling the dealership and were unable to talk to anyone.
“They would eventually work their way around getting to the store and go to our call centers, where they could speak to a human,” Rodriguez said. “So with that data — the reviews we received about being able to reach us — we created what’s essentially a ticketing system, where the store and the appropriate personnel are notified. They’re timed, so they have a timed response.
“Essentially, it’s a human-in-the-loop voicemail, and it works really well. We’ve seen that concern go away completely. Now we don’t have customers telling us they aren’t able to get ahold of us. It’s definitely a great feeling seeing something like that go away.”
For Reputation’s Barth, the feeling was just as good. His company had been working with Napleton for years before Rodriguez assumed the CX role, and watching him take the initiative and make things happen has been very gratifying.
“We have the tools,” Barth said. “It’s like, you can lead a horse to water but you can’t make him drink it. The people that were in his position previously just kind of like, ‘Oh, yeah, things are rolling along.’ But they never really dove into it and took full advantage of the tool.
“When Eduardo came in … for him to take full advantage of it, it’s just amazing how he’s run with it. He’s brilliant.” Rodriguez said the credit for the success of his customer experience program is more like an even split between Napleton and its vendor partner.
“To say any of our changes were inspired solely by our auto group would not be an accurate statement,” he said. “All of our data for Reputation, all of our social customer comments… that data is proof. That data is what allowed me to bring to ownership and show them we have 15 customers in this seven-day time period who are upset about this. I think we need to address this. And with our scale, it would be more like we have hundreds of customers.
“To be able to have that documentation, and not only have it, but be able to pull it up and have it already sorted for you, I would say that they are, it’s a 50-50 responsibility.”
“We have the tools,” Barth said. “It’s like, you can lead a horse to water but you can’t make him drink it. The people that were in his position previously just kind of like, ‘Oh, yeah, things are rolling along.’ But they never really dove into it and took full advantage of the tool. When Eduardo came in … for him to take full advantage of it, it’s just amazing how he’s run with it. He’s brilliant.”
– JOHN BARTH, Reputation
But as valuable as the data is, the key to making it all work for an operation as large as Napleton is getting the 63 dealerships, with 63 general managers and hundreds of employees, on board with the program.
“Buy-in, buy-in, buy-in, buy-in,” Rodriguez said. “It’s not an easy task. In our business, we all know what’s best for our store, and that’s why we hire the GMs, because they’re the professionals for that location. They know their brand, and that’s how they earn their position.
“Understanding and partnering with the dealerships is how we’ve come to really find success. So, yes, we’re their corporate office, but we act more as a partnership rather than ownership, and that is really the key buy-in.”
Rodriguez said it’s important to get the stores to understand that while Reputation is a tool, like many others on the dealership tool belt, “this is the number one. If you use this, everything else is going to fall in place.”
From there, it’s all about process, training and testing.
“We make sure they understand from A to Z what the process is,” Rodriguez said. “We make sure that process is bulletproof. We don’t just launch it. We pilot it, and then we work out the bugs on a smaller scale.
“Once we have all that working and all the issues are resolved, then we roll it out to the entire group. And with them knowing they’re getting into something that has been tried, tested and verified that it’s going to work, they tend to buy a little bit more in. It’s a little bit easier to sell.”
The dealers appear sold on the process, so much so that they’re not just holding their daily pulse meetings — they’re showing them off and bragging about them.
“It’s gotten to the point where they broadcast them for us,” Rodriguez said. “They want to show us how good their meetings were. They record them on Zoom, and then they send them to us to say, ‘This was my daily meeting on Monday. This was my daily meeting on Tuesday. Just so you guys know I’m following your protocol, and this is how good we’re doing it.’
“And that is a breath of fresh air when you get that level of buy-in from your store staff.”
Rodriguez got an even stronger sense of how much customer experience has been taken to heart when he did a secret shop at one of Napleton’s stores, something he does occasionally when he knows a sales or service manager is going to be away.
This one gave him “one of the most breathtaking experiences” he’d ever had at a dealership. He drove up to the service department in an electric vehicle and asked if they could unplug a car they had charging and plug his car in.
“They brought the advisor out,” he said. “They helped me do it. In fact, they pretty much did it for me. And they said, ‘It’s going to be a little bit. Why don’t you come on in, help yourself to some coffee and water. We have a station here.’
“I’m driving an off-brand car. They have no clue who I am. They had never seen me before. It was just a warm and fuzzy Ritz-Carlton feeling.”
There are still CX goals yet to be reached. No. 1 on that list, Rodriguez said, is having 100% of Napleton’s stores exceeding all factory benchmarks within the next two years.
“Obviously, when you take better care of your customers, you’re going to sell more cars, you’re going to service more vehicles and increase business revenue,” he said. “That we are succeeding on.
“As far as the timeline, our current 24-month goal is almost achieved. We’re really ahead of schedule. We’re hoping that by the end of Q1 of 2026 we are there.”
As happy as Barth is to see Rodriguez and Napleton succeed, if frustrates him that so many dealers “still don’t get it” when it comes to handling reviews, managing their dealership’s reputation and focusing on customer experience.
“It still blows my mind at this point,” he said. “It’s like, ‘I don’t even want to deal with Google.’ … It’s flabbergasting. ... You can see the difference in performance when you actually have buy-in from the top down. It’s like, ‘This is important and this is how it’s going to happen.’ And it does.
“But then you have people who still want to go online and argue with the customer. They’ll say, ‘I tried to take care of you. We did this and this for you.’ You don’t put that out on Google. You address the problem. You take it offline. You try to fix it. It’s that simple.”
When dealers do that, Barth said, they can create the best kind of customer.
“When you have one of those customers who leaves you a negative review, if you can turn that around, you now actually have an advocate. The percentages show that if you’ve got somebody that was angry at you and you take the time to try and fix that problem and make it right, you’ll have a real customer and an advocate for your business.
“I’ve seen it personally in the business. But I see it all the time when it comes to your online reputation.”
Rodriguez pointed out that a Bright Local study found 93% of consumers read online reviews before making a purchase, and said the youngest car-buying generation, Gen Z, is more likely to use social reviews than their elders.
“Whether the reviews were positive or negative and how they responded to the reviews, all that was part of their deciding factor whether they were even going to consider your location,” he said. “That shows the customer experience is a KPI. This experience is going to bring in revenue.
“Obviously, taking care of the customer, that’s always been my ultimate goal. I look at customers as a forest, and that’s how I always train. This is our garden, guys. Everyone’s a little seed, every little action.”
Article courtesy of Auto Remarketing, written by Andrew Friedlander
