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What We Say In Car Dealer Reviews Actually Says a Lot About Us

Car dealerships have taken the on-line customer service review about as far as any industry can. That customer feedback helps us know more about dealers, but it also reveals a lot about us as well.

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Cars.com recently analyzed about 1 million customer dealership reviews and found some very interesting things, not about the car dealerships, but about us. The first discovery is that we are not at work. More accurately, we may be located at work, but we are on-line filling out car dealership reviews. Cars.com deduced that because it knows that 52% of the reviews submitted are typed during the meat of the workday, between 10 am and 4 pm. It's not like we went shopping on a Monday or Friday holiday either. Most of the reviews we do are submitted Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday.

Only 7% of dealership reviews are submitted on Sunday. Hey, what do you expect, that's OUR time.

Another interesting discovery is that Northeasterners are not the abrasive and rude folks they are often made out to be. In reviews, those from the Northeast are more than twice as likely as folks from any other region to include "thank you" in the text. Yankees also tend to direct their writing to the individuals who helped them at the dealership, as opposed to writing about the dealership as an entity.

Yes, as we all know people take a lot more time to complain than we do to say "good job." In fact, negative reviews run an average of 142 percent longer than the positive ones. The last discovery is that the negative reviews are mostly written on Saturday, Sunday, and Monday. Cars.com offers the suggestion that this could be because on weekends dealers may be busier and, therefore, less able to provide a positive buying experience. I don't think that's it. My take after reading over the data is that we get more angry when things don't go well on OUR time, as opposed to say, when we duck out of work to check out a new ride.

Story image by John Goreham

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