ReviewBuilder FAQ

Auto Reminders: Automate the review reminders for your customers and transform your review capture efforts into an efficient, hands-free, repeatable process. Capture a higher volume of reviews on the sites that matter most, allowing you to leverage the positive stories right away and address unhappy customers before it impacts CSI scores.

Smart Targeting: We’ll figure out where the need for reviews is greatest every day, between DealerRater, Google, and Facebook, and will adjust the volume of reviewers we send to those sites accordingly.

Verified Customers: All reviews that are submitted to DealerRater from a ReviewBuilder request will appear on the website with a “Verified Customer” seal, providing an additional level of trust for consumers that the review was written by a real dealership customer.

Smart Targeting refers to an algorithm that runs every day to analyze how you’re doing on DealerRater, Google, and Facebook. Specifically, we’ll look at your overall score, total review count, and the number of reviews you’ve received in the last 60 days to determine which site needs the highest volume of reviews today. The algorithm will adjust every day so that, over time, your scores and review counts will even out across these websites, telling a more consistent brand story.

A verified Customer review is a DealerRater review for which the author has been verified from actual dealership records. Since the reviews that are generated from ReviewBuilder originate from a consumer whose mobile phone number or email addresses came from your DMS records, we can display a Verified Customer seal with their review on DealerRater. Verified Customer reviews provide another layer of transparency and confidence that the reviews displayed are genuine reviews written by real customers.

After signing the contract and providing some necessary information, your dealership will undergo a brief setup process with our support team. We may need to connect with a technical contact at your dealership in case any difficulties arise with capturing the data necessary for sending out the daily review requests. We use that data to send out automated review requests to your sales and service customers 24 hours after their experience (or at the interval you selected).

All of your sales and service customers who have not yet left a review on DealerRater. If a customer has previously left a review through LotShot or anywhere else on DealerRater, they are omitted from the ReviewBuilder request. We will also omit any customers who recieved a LotShot review request.

On the day a customer is supposed to receive the request, we will send any emails at 11:00 am EST and text messages at 1:00 pm EST. If a text message fails for any reason, that customer will receive an email at 11:00 am EST the following day.

Before determining which customers receive a text message, we scan the data file to see if consent was captured in your DMS. This consent is included in the data we receive from your DMS and if the customer has not agreed, or your DMS does not pass this along, we will not send a text message to those customers. Even if you have opted to send text messages in the ReviewBuilder setup page, any customers without consent will be sent an email instead.

If your dealership uses Reynolds & Reynolds as your DMS provider, we work directly with them. If you use any other DMS provider, we work with Digital Motorworks, Inc. (a CDK company) to receive your dealerships’ data. This is outlined in more detail in the ReviewBuilder Agreement you signed when purchasing ReviewBuilder.

We only pull data relevant to sales and service transactions, such as delivery date, details of the vehicle purchased or services performed, contact information including email address and phone number. We do not have access to social security numbers, credit card information, or other such sensitive information.

It depends. If they received the ReviewBuilder request via email than they will not need to do this, as we’ll already have their email address. If they received the text message we will ask them to create an account on DealerRater with a valid email address upon leaving their review. This is necessary in the case that their review is negative. You’ll have the ability to reach out to the customer if a negative review is left, and we need their email address for that to happen.

Once we receive your setup form back, we ask that you allow approximately 1 week for DMI or Reynolds to begin sending us your data and for us to verify and check the data on our end. At that point we will flip you “live,” and your customers will begin receiving requests the following day (or at the interval you selected).

Yes! All DealerRater reviews will syndicate like any other review you’ve collected on DealerRater. This is true whether the request is sent via text, email, LotShot, or customer self-navigating to your review form. Each review is moderated by our Content Team, syndicated to your website, Cars.com, etc and build into your overall dealership ratings and recommendation rate on DealerRater.com. Reviews generated on Google or Facebook will not be syndicated to our network, as we only have the ability to do this with reviews originating on DealerRater.

Absolutely! ReviewBuilder works seamlessly with LotShot. ReviewBuilder has built-in logic to detect whether you've sent a LotShot request to your customer. If so, we will not send an automated request.