Motor Madness, Reputation at the Top, GM’s In-Car Chat GPT

‍SPEAKERS

Kyle Mountsier, Paul Daly, Jamie Oldershaw

Paul Daly  00:31

Good morning, troublemakers. Happy Monday. Boy do we have a lot to talk about today we got motor madness. Chet GPT in your car? Yes, it's here. And the one and only Jamie Oh, Michelle to talk about Dealer of the year. The people really want to know too much for Monday. Or Monday. There's, there's a lot of else that we're not talking about today that I'm sure you're aware of with finance and all that. But let us get sent

Kyle Mountsier  00:57

like, we know, we know SVB it's happening. There's things happening. We're gonna wait, we're gonna just hold just a minute on us. We're gonna wait till a little bit more the dust settles and maybe we'll bring you a little like impact to auto. So just hang tight. We might get some smarter minds than us on the whole banking premium. Maybe

Paul Daly  01:15

that's our strategy. Just get people smarter than us which we'll get to later in the show today. But today we are kicking off motor madness. It is our verse look at that logo. It's actually the first time I'm seeing it. That's so good. It's got this like Thor Ragnarok feel to it. Moto Madness is our version of March of March Madness, where we're pitting vehicles, classic vehicles against modern vehicles and our community gets to vote every day. We're starting with eight on each side. And we're going to end up with one champion the greatest car of all time, probably not. But you get to decide that you can just light us up in the

Kyle Mountsier  01:52

greatest car inside kudos all time.

Paul Daly  01:56

Yeah, that's right. So Todd Caputo, who you know, longtime Chevy dealer. We had him play a major role in curating lists, which is why today's combo so if you get our daily email, you can get it out of soda.com or just follow us on LinkedIn. The polls are gonna be there. You'll be able to find it anywhere we are. And today's matchup we got all Chevy's Chevy's V Chevy's, today, the classic cars is a 79 Impala versus an 87 Camaro Iraq z. So if you are an Italian contractor, you know exactly what an Iraq z is. Can I say that? I grew up in Jersey man, every Italian contractor son had an Iraq see in the modern cars. It's a 2011 Chevy Impala like the souped up SS kind, or get this one, a 2010. Chevy Astro van,

Kyle Mountsier  02:44

you know what, I think that's gonna win. It might just win out of like, it might win the whole day. You're being ridiculous.

Paul Daly  02:51

And it's funny, and we're all sold them for $20,000

Kyle Mountsier  02:54

in gross profit early in 2014. That's exactly what it was. They were awesome,

Paul Daly  03:02

awesome trucks. And you know, in some of our content, you'll see Todd Tucker putos rationale. And the reason he picked this truck, he's like, I sold so many of these things. He's like, it's the greatest cars of all time. So we're gonna have a lot of fun with that. And we're also going to have a big event coming up in Arlington on April 5. So a lot information coming out that if you're in Arlington, Texas, not Virginia, Arlington, Texas. If you're in Arlington, Virginia, you can fly in and see us to fly. We got an awesome show coming up for you. We hope you can be there and join us the evening of April 5. All right. Let's get into some news. Kyle, did you realize it was coming this quickly?

Kyle Mountsier  03:36

You know, I still think? Okay, just tell him what it is Paul. All right. All right, you might

Paul Daly  03:44

look I think we kind of all knew it was moving fast. But according to sources close to the matter, General Motors talked about them on Friday is working on integrating chat GPT into its vehicles operating system in the form of a virtual assistant, virtual assistant, you know that they've partnered with Microsoft to build their operating system. So there's already an advantage there. So Microsoft's as your cloud service, which has exclusive rights to open AI tech, the powers chat GPT is part of the part of the deal. Now, GM did confirm this. And we're not just talking about sources closest to the matter. Scott Miller, GM, GM is Vice President of Software Defined vehicle and operating systems confirmed it as he expounded on the idea of a highly useful and responsible responsive virtual assistant that could you know, explain things like how to change a flat, or what that warning light means on your dashboard, maybe even a book a service call, and anyone who has ever interacted with that little warning and call it an assistant when you press the little voice button the cards like to talk and then you like say something and then it gets it and it gets it wrong. Every time. You're like by the time I told you to adjust the tech cabin temperature to 72 degree right like I'm just pressing the button because they're terrible.

Kyle Mountsier  04:57

You know, I I'm really hopeful that They understand exactly what this tech does and what it is, I would hope that I Vice President of Software of GM understands that, you know, my, you know, my feelings about OEMs and technology,

Paul Daly  05:13

trouble on a Monday don't get in trouble struggling a little bit, okay.

Kyle Mountsier  05:17

But if they understand it, and they understand that it needs to be trained, right, it has to have some level of training, like, here's the owner's manual, learn that now spit things out. I think that's gonna go a lot better. You know, the, the other question is just, you know, how can we integrate this into Burton booking service appointments into the multiple DMS mobile schedulers project, I wouldn't expect this thing to be sliding down the pipe in the next like three to six months, big development project for an OEM, and they've got to wrap their heads around exactly how GPT and here's the thing, actually, just this week, there's been multiple reports that GDP four is coming out in the next week, like they're going to release it. And so learning at that scale is going to be a whole different level. There's even going to be video capacities and released to it to basically put frames together to build a video. So there is a reality that you could utilize for to create a dynamic video on how to have that exact vehicle if it understands everything that's going on in the bill. Oh, right out there, but there's just so much learning to be done. And I just I have this feeling that OEMs may be may not want to be the ones to tip toe into it.

Paul Daly  06:35

Let's make it flexible, they did say that there is going to be a car specific layer over everything. So they're not just letting it out. So we'll see what happens. But you know, there's nothing like talking about the future like a Monday and talking about this stuff. Just you know, trying to try to keep it fun and flexible, fun and flexible. Listen, speaking of keeping things fun and flexible. Segue you know, there's nothing more fun than the comment section of most posts on the internet or the review section for that matter, because sometimes it just read Amazon reviews for entertainment. And so we're gonna welcome ugly Amazon this show. Absolutely. Jamie ottershaw. VP of jet. What's the title General Manager DealerRater and VP of reputation strategy that I get that right?

Jamie Oldershaw  07:23

It's too much but yeah, you good. It's nailed

Paul Daly  07:27

it as JB JB Aldershot, thank you for joining us again. Last time. We were together having a conversation. We ended up in federal government documents we did.

Jamie Oldershaw  07:35

It was great. Hopefully we won't end up there this time or

Paul Daly  07:39

reason. Good Reason.

Jamie Oldershaw  07:41

Good marketing. But now look, I can't think of a better show to come on to talk about the best of the best and local automotive retail than this one. So it's a it's just great to be here. Thanks for Yeah,

Kyle Mountsier  07:54

so I we want you to talk a little bit about the DealerRater dealer the Year Award, he that you guys have just recently announced and a lot of dealers are getting that little notification in their dealer at a rate a panel or email saying they've won, either their state specific or regional or national. And so we'd love for you to talk about a little bit about that. I've got some firsthand experience with just how that encourages a dealership and what you get to bring alongside of that. But talk a little bit about how this kind of came about what what the the the award looks like now, and maybe some highlights from this year.

Jamie Oldershaw  08:30

Yeah, sure. Thanks. So this is our 14th year, I can't believe it's been 14 years since we started into this award started off just recognizing a small group of dealers. But I mean, the idea behind it was we you know, we wanted to showcase the best of the best for consumers. So we wanted to be based on customer feedback. You know, back in the early days, dealers embraced it right off the bat back then we're generating far fewer reviews. So the number of winners was a bit smaller. But you know, we we want to celebrate local, we want to celebrate local retailers the work that they do, to not only provide an exceptional customer experience, but also those who are really good at getting consumers to come to our platform to share that story. Because it's one thing to provide a fantastic experience. But you need people to go talk about it, you need that social proof you need buy in amongst folks in your in your, amongst your team to go ask for that content. So I mean, over the year, the awards program has just gotten bigger and bigger. And so you know, essentially how we run it is we look at all the content that was collected on our platform for the previous calendar year. So for the 2023 Awards that we just gave out. It's based on all the content for 2022. And on our platform, we are there were 1.1 million reviews across 18,600 dealers. So it's a lot of content, a lot of hard work that a lot of viewers put into generating that content. And we essentially look at two components, its review volume and review score. We've got a third component that maybe I'll tease now and come back to in a little bit that we're introducing this year. It's exclusive here, you're you're hearing it here. First, we're going to have more information coming out about it. But we run a fancy algorithm built by people smarter than me, and we come up with what we call the power score, and that ranks all the dealers. And then from there we award it sort of starts with the eight regions. And we have so the eight regional awards, which we showcased in the announcement last week. And then we have the national brand awards about 50, dealers or so US and Canada. And then the state brand award winners. So that's all of the brand winners at the state level. So all told, it's about 1200 dealers that are awarded with do of the year recognition for the previous calendar year. And then below that we have the consumer satisfaction Awards, where we look at the top 10% of franchised dealers, again, based on power score, and then the Indies and the Canadian dealers who meet the criteria. So it's a broad awards program, but it's my favorite time of the year, because we get to recognize the best of the best for local. And these dudes, you know, they all deserve it, you you do not win this award by accident.

Paul Daly  11:37

Right? Because you can't write can't mess with the results. Right? It's like people are gonna say what they're gonna say

Jamie Oldershaw  11:43

it's pure. I mean, this is pure data. It's coming right from consumers. Sometimes in some state brand contests, it literally comes down to 100, or even a 1,000th of a point. I mean, they are so Wow. So they're very, very competitive awards. And we built this year tracker now. So dealers as they come into the year, they can see where they rank. And so throughout the year, Oh, that's great. That's an amazing additive juices, and they can see what their power score is as the year goes on. So they can kind of see how they're doing and give their team incentives to keep pushing to try to get the top prize. So it'll be funny how that rolls out this year.

Kyle Mountsier  12:24

That's awesome. I love that because as a dealer, I was always going, oh, man, I wish I could know just where I'm at, you know, are we tracking? Are we winning all that type of stuff. And that's like the competitive edge of a dealer to win in that customer satisfaction. So I think that's a, that's a, that's a big deal right there.

Jamie Oldershaw  12:43

So we want to provide as much transparency as we can. So now if dealers come to the that chart in our dealer panel, they can see how they stacked up for the for this year's award. So for the for the award that we just gave out, they can sort of see where they are. I mean, it's a blessing and a curse, because some dealers will see they missed it literally by like a few 1000s. Soon, we're going to have like

Paul Daly  13:07

the Eagles in the Super Bowl this year. Much. So let me ask you this. So, you know, this is one of the things that often goes under looked in automotive, because people, the consumers could easily say, or adopt the stigma that you know, it's a tough environment, and it's combative. And the truth is, is that you have insane amount of first party pure data, as you call it, where anyone can go at any time. And just look at what other consumers say, like when we go on to Amazon, you know, it's easy, we click on the scores, we trust most of the reviews, but it almost it almost seems like DealerRater is actually almost a little cleaner and harder to game than even the Amazon stuff is.

Jamie Oldershaw  13:56

Yeah, we I mean, we build a lot of work into our, you know, content. Moderation, we spend a lot of time building that out. We take a lot of pride in the transparency and the quality of the content that we produce. But we also want, you know, the consumers when it comes to the platform, they want them to tell a story and so that we have a 15 word minimum, you gotta at least start talking about your experience, we find that once we get consumers to do that, you know, the average word count on our platform is I think, like 50 words per review. So like, you

Paul Daly  14:27

can't just click a star level and go you have to type at least 15 words and you gotta

Jamie Oldershaw  14:32

at least tell us something right because, you know, five stars, that might be great for an incentive program at the dealership, but it's not going to help. It's not that's not a local story.

Kyle Mountsier  14:42

Right? Yeah. And with other consumers, like that's what everybody wants, you know, they want to read the story.

Jamie Oldershaw  14:49

Exactly. And we want to be able to collect content across various dimensions of the experience, like financing experience, trade and experience price, transparency, speed of trade. Is action quality work? Like we want to give the dealers the feedback that they need to get better and five stars for an overall experience? It's not going to do the trick. And we also want to make sure that, you know, consumers can rate the employees that they did business with, because it's not just hey, was this dealership great, but how did Paul do? How did Kyle do and you know, I mean, dealers can use that and leverage that, for performance management and training and encouragement and, and just general accountability within the dealership, which we find, you know, do over the year, winners embrace that. And they've, you know, they've really enabled their employees to be Taggable on our site as stumps, you know, not something you need to pay us a dime to do, you can just claim your listing and load in your employees. And now, everyone can be rated at the dealership and can't do that on Google or Yelp or any other platforms.

Paul Daly  15:52

So let me ask you a question. Go ahead. Go ahead. The

Kyle Mountsier  15:54

question I have on my on my mind, and maybe a lot of people do is, is there a top dog? Is there a number one overall national winner to beat all winners? Is that Is that a thing?

Jamie Oldershaw  16:07

Yeah, it's funny, we used to do that we had that. In fact, we did that for eight years. And then we realized, you know, from again, there's a lot of competition. There's so many prideful dealers who just want to win that top award. And we realized that no consumer standpoint, you know, it's probably not helpful to have one winner. That's a particular brand and a particular state that's awful for that consumer. But at the brand level, I think it's important to have the best of the best for a brand, or, or the owner, Mercedes, whatever. So we've kept the that sort of national brand level, but we did reintroduce kind of this top tier. And instead of having one dealer to rule them all, we had these eight regional winners. So you can sort of get out the dealer, the best dealer for particular brand within your region, if that's important to you as a consumer, and we know that it is that's something that we're

Paul Daly  17:09

so let me ask you this, we're almost out of time. You've obviously read many, many, many, many more reviews than the average person. When, if you were to summarize, like what the consumer is looking for what they tend to complain about the most, or what's the common, the common negative thing that comes up? What would you say is the most common thing that dealers can be paying more attention to?

Jamie Oldershaw  17:30

Probably communication, mis miscommunication, lack of communication, lack of follow up, that appears frequent very frequently in the content that we see as far as ways for dealerships to improve. In fact, I teased this earlier, and I want to come back to it before the end of the time here. The third factor that we're going to include in the rating CAC in the score calculation for next year's awards, is review response rate. Because it's a really important component of your investment in the consumer and staying connected with your customers and that if someone comes to take the time to share feedback about your dealership, you're taking the time to say thank you. And please come back to us when you need help and come back to us for your next car come back to us for service. Those are the dealers that are really engaged with content and we want to make sure that we recognize those dealers and factor that in so that'll be sort of the third factors as we look at next year scoring, review, you know, review scores, review volume and then review response rate on DealerRater and cars so connecting, talking to consumers more important than ever.

Paul Daly  18:42

You heard him say it Jamie Shaw DealerRater. Get out there and communicate with your customers. Watch out for that chat GPT.

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