Category Archives: internet

TrueCar Goes Too Far

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Look, I’ve not been a big supporter of this TrueCar lynchmob for a few reasons. I don’t believe that TrueCar is solely responsible for all of the issues pointing their way. In my opinion, they are just a very visible and convenient target for a much wider-spread problem. My position has always been that the dealer needs to police its own data, not get mad at a vendor that’s been taking it and repurposing it. If you don’t want any vendor to have access to your DMS, don’t give it to them. Be mad, yes, but at yourself.

Transparency on the internet is not going away. Consumers won’t allow it. There are many third party sites that operate in a similar way to TrueCar. Getting rid of one is not going to stop other sites from taking their place.

If TrueCar is really changing to conform to state regulations, that’s a step in the right direction. You can’t blame THEM for the race to the bottom, dealers are to blame. Steve Stauning laid out the argument perfectly in his recent blog post: “How TrueCar.com Caught Dealers Off Guard”

This post, however, is not to debate whether TrueCar is right or wrong or any of the arguments for or against them.

I read today that TrueCar has purchased some interesting domain names from Domain Name Wire.

They are:

F*ckedbytheDealer.com
F*ckedbytheDealer.net
F*ckedbytheDealer.org

Now I don’t know about you, but that certainly doesn’t seem like a “dealer partner” to me. The only reason for buying those domains is to attract consumers who are pissed off at dealers. I mean, c’mon, anyone who wants to buy a car (which is what TrueCar is supposed to help people do easier, right?) and is searching with those keywords may not be a customer I want to have. That’s pretty extreme. Even if they optimize for DIFFERENT keywords, the fact remains that if someone were to click on that URL (after reading the domain name), I highly doubt they’re going there to try and buy a car. Chances are they’re going there because they feel like they’ve been.. well.. “f*cked by the dealer”. Now you’re going to try and massage that and send them to a dealer? What?!?

That’s a CSI nightmare waiting to happen and probably on a loser deal. (Not that the amount of profit should make a difference.)

Is this a preventative tactic? What will they actually PUT on those websites and/or where will they redirect them? Time will tell.

Like they didn’t have enough heat to worry about.

[NOTE: Since this post, I've added a new comment feature. Comments prior to today can be seen by scrolling down further under the "About" block of text.]

BMW Dealer Customer Service Fail Goes Viral

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A customer comes into your dealership because the warning lights come on in his Certified Pre-owned BMW after your service department tells him to bring it in immediately. He comes in and your first tier tech tells him the lights only apply to an emissions issue which doesn’t apply in his state, promptly turns the warning lights off and tells the customer he’s “good to go”. The customer leaves and two days later, the steering fails on his car while driving 65-75 mph on the freeway causing him to crash off the side of the road. When he complains to the GM, no apology is given and he’s told to bring the car back in. He expresses concern about his trust in the dealership and says he wants to go to a different one and is told that he can only bring the car there.

He then goes online and starts asking questions in a brand-enthusiast forum. After getting some information and advice from his peers, he meets with the GM at the dealership where, after expressing his concerns about the dealership’s service quality, the GM asks “then you shouldn’t even be in my office wasting my time”. The customer then agrees to let the dealer pick up his car via flatbed to look at it but is denied a loaner car.

Someone at your corporate office sees his online forum posting and has the corporate LAWYER call the customer requesting that he remove his online posting. He refuses and takes the car to an independent mechanic where he is told that the codes indicate issues with “steering and stability control”.

BMW North America gets involved. They ask the customer to bring his car into a different dealer and promise to fly in a team of specialized engineers. They confirm the steering and stability issues, charge him his $50 deductible and only fix two issues that are covered under his CPO warranty. Neither the corporate office or the dealership will explain to him what was wrong or take any responsibility and, when asked why, they say they “don’t appreciate that (he’s) made this a public issue on the forums.”

Yes, this really happened. What a train wreck.

The dealership? BMW of North Scottsdale. (a Penske Automotive dealership)

This story made the website “Jalopnik” yesterday. The article (in which the dealer is not only named but linked to) “Did a Dealer Ignore a Faulty, Dangerous BMW?” has received 27,334 unique visitors and has 209 comments. In one day.

The original forum post has 327 comments on it in less than 30 days and has been viewed by 27,956 unique visitors.

The Jalopnik article is now in the #6 position on Google Page 1 for a search for the store’s name, four spots up from their DealerRater page.

 

bmw

We’ve all experienced irate customers. We all make mistakes. There were so many opportunities for customer service to appear by so many different parties (technician, service manager, general manager, corporate office, manufacturer, the second dealership, and, of course, the corporate lawyer), yet it never did and now the dealer and BMW have a PR nightmare on their hands.

One forum poster actually said this: “Scottsdale BMW got a pretty good rating at dealer rater…shall we change that?”

What would you do if this happened at your dealership? How would you handle this?

Who Is Tapping YOUR DMS?

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There is a lot of controversy in the automotive industry regarding which vendors are pulling data (customer or transactional) from a dealer’s DMS and then re-selling it to vendors like TrueCar and others. (I guarantee you that TrueCar is not the only vendor that’s using your data against you, FYI)

[Note: For non-automotive industry readers: DMS stands for Data Management System and is what contains all customer, financial, vehicle and transactional data (ie. all that information on the credit application you filled out when you bought that car). There are dealer vendors (website companies, 3rd party services like TrueCar.com, Edmunds.com, Cars.com, etc.) that are given access to this information for various reasons.]

Consumer privacy laws and red flag compliance keep getting stricter and stricter when it comes to customer personal information and how it needs to be protected. This is all well and good but I’d argue that most consumers don’t care about their personal information. They may say they do but actions speak louder than words.

An industry acquaintance shared a website yesterday that assists people in seeing, and cleaning up, which apps and websites are accessing your various social media accounts. (You can find it at http://mypermissions.org/ )

As I played around with it, there wasn’t much in there that surprised me but I’m also very diligent about which apps I allow to access my information and I periodically monitor them to remove permissions for apps or websites I no longer use. Even though I do that, there were a few in there that I was surprised to see. I guarantee you that a normal consumer has way more apps and websites accessing their personal information than I do – games, iPhone apps, websites with social media log-ins, plug-ins etc. Most require (or ask) to access your personal information to use their service. How convenient is it to use Facebook Connect? It’s super-easy but, every time you do, you are giving yet another website or app permission to access your personal information – essentially trading your information for convenience and/or the ability to utilize that particular website.

As I thought about this collection of different social media sites – Facebook, Twitter, G+, LinkedIn, etc. – it started to feel more and more to me like this was MY OWN PERSONAL DMS.

These accounts – singly and collectively – contain more personal information about me than any other source including the government.

Those social networks are free to use, but are they really? In one sense, they do exactly what your vendors are doing to your dealership’s DMS – selling your personal information for profit. Most consumers know this on some level and have chosen to allow that access in exchange for their information on some level. Sure, there are times when a consumer outcry occurs -  say when Facebook changes a privacy setting – but those quickly go away mostly because the consumer modifies the permissions again (ie. who can see your posts or other activity on Facebook).

So consumers do care about protecting their information, posts, etc. from people on an individual level, what they’re not shielding themselves from or thinking about is what companies are getting their personal data (either from the sites themselves or from outside apps and websites that they’ve allowed access) and what those companies are doing with it.

So, while we’re in an uproar about what vendors are getting access to customer data and what they are doing with it, keep in mind that you also have your own personal DMS and, just like you should care who has access to your customer’s information, you should care about who has access to your own.

Fantasy Guru’s Social Media Fail

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guru2

My brother is a fantasy sports freak. He especially gets into football. Every Sunday, you can find him firmly planted in front of my TV watching my Sunday Ticket subscription with his laptop in his lap cycling through his many teams refreshing his fantasy football scores. You’d think he was in the stadium sometimes as he yells (or cheers) at the television. He’s also hyper-competitive.

We play in one league together and, at any point in time, he knows, off the top of his head, all the league’s statistics. Who’s in first place..Who has the most points..Playoff scenarios..etc. He’s made 74 roster changes whereas the rest of a 12 team-league has made a combined average of 11 moves (and that’s with my above-average 37 moves included). I stopped checking Yahoo for my scores and info. I just ask him now.

He’s been a fan of, and subscriber to, a premium fantasy football website named FantasyGuru.com run by John Hansen who has been affiliated with major companies and personalities including hosting a radio show, SiriusXM Fantasy Sports Radio with FoxSports.com’s Adam Caplan which was so popular that it became a seven-day-a-week program during the NFL season which included senior writers Matt Camp and Joe Dolan. He’s participated in celebrity drafts including Ashton Kutcher, has published on ESPN.com, and has appeared on television in projects with NFL.com, NFL Network, DirecTV, ComCast SportsNet, and even a cameo on an episode of FX’s The League.

This week my brother is particularly passionate as he’s playing his big brother (me) in our league’s playoffs. He uses the advice and statistics from this website to help him analyze players, waiver wire pickups, and to assist him in choosing his lineup each week.

He’s not a social media person. That being said, he does have a Twitter account. It has only 1 follower (me) and he’s tweeted only 4 times. The ONLY reason he has a Twitter account is to watch the tweets of @Fantasy_Guru to get up-to-the-minute injury reports and news.

So, in this weeks projections, one player – Donald Brown of the Indianapolis Colts – was projected to do well on a combined list of running backs and wide receivers. Long story short, the player hardly played at all and ended up with low points.

Because of his passion and the desire to win against his big brother and advance to our league’s championship, he tweets this out to the Fantasy Guru twitter account:

rafe

Keep in mind that this guy (@Fantasy_Guru) has over 25,000 followers. He gets mentioned and/or tweeted to continuously. My brother is square in the middle of his demographic – hyper-competitive people passionate about fantasy football. It’s hard to believe that his analysis isn’t challenged or critiqued by other people via Twitter. The guy isn’t always right but I don’t think anyone really believes he has a crystal ball.

For whatever reason, he took exception to this particular tweet and sent this direct message in response:

guru

My brother only followed him and has only 1 follower. @Fantasy_Guru has 25,009 followers and follows only 266 and (obviously) doesn’t follow my brother. I understand that. He follows sportswriters, teams and players to get information which he then passes along to his subscribers/followers and he does it very well.

First, seeing as this person runs a BUSINESS in which he charges ~$30 per year, you’d think he’d be more careful alienating and lashing out at people. Notice that he chose to direct message my brother rather than reply publicly. This was particularly frustrating to my brother since he couldn’t respond to the message since @Fantasy_Guru doesn’t follow him. That’s certainly not a way to treat paying customers and a poor choice on his part. My guess is he chose to direct message because by replying like that publicly would make him look bad.

Little did he realize that my brother has been a subscriber of his for 11 years and has referred many people to also subscribe to his service. While $330 in income may not mean anything to John Hansen, it is definitely a luxury to my brother. The amount of money doesn’t excuse abusing your customers.

It took him about 10 seconds to destroy a loyal customer. Not a smart business decision.

Now my brother follows nobody.

Social media is a powerful medium. No matter what size your business is, customer service matters. Do you think Southwest Airlines or Ford would ever think about responding to a customer this way?? Imagine this DM coming from Southwest: “You set up a Twitter account just to complain? Go fly another airline.” Not going to happen. Any employee who did that would be fired instantly. Ask Scott Monty or Christi McNeill.

As the old saying goes, “A happy customer tells 10 friends, an unhappy one tells everybody.”

Now thousands of people will know that he apparently doesn’t value his subscribers.

[UPDATE: Apparently Matt Camp read my article. His response was to make fun of a math mistake (which I've since edited). I guess he values his audience just as much as John Hansen does.

[UPDATE 2: I guess John Hansen got annoyed with my tweets as he's decided to block me. Can't take the heat?]

Target Gets Robbed via Facebook Promotion

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In yet another example of “promotions gone wrong”, Target just got robbed by it’s Facebook fans and a bunch of thieves opportunists.

Target-Fail

Target had a promotion via its Facebook page for a coupon which gave a customer a $10 gift card for spending $50. The coupon could be printed only via coupon printing software and you could only print it a certain number of times, yet the coupons did not have unique barcodes. (Kinkos anyone?) It was a great deal for Christmas shoppers or even grocery shoppers (via a Super Target) but a bunch of people figured out how to game the system and abuse the promotion.

I became aware of it through SlickDeals, a forum for bargain hunters. As people used and experimented with this coupon, they found that they were able to purchase gift cards and get the corresponding free $10 gift card from the promotion even though the coupon stated that gift card purchases were ineligible. Also, seeing as the coupons were not unique, any photocopier skirted the whole printing limitations from the coupon printing software.

As you can see via this 37 page thread with almost 1500 posts, people found that they could effectively rob Target legally (At least I think its legal. I’m not an attorney.) What they found they could do was this:

They would buy a $50 Target gift card, use the coupon and get a $10 Target gift card free. They would then purchase another $50 Target gift card using the FIRST $50 Target gift card to pay for the SECOND Target gift card, use another coupon and get another $10 Target gift card. (Initial purchase: $50. Profit: $20. etc.) Rinse and repeat. (Since you’re not actually purchasing anything, you’ll always have your initial $50 in the form of a gift card and, since you’re using the gift card to buy more gift cards, each transaction just nets you $10.)

There are a number of people who claim to have netted as much as $5,000 in free Target gift cards off their initial $50 investment. This promotion started November 30, 2011 and ended December 3, 2011.

What was surely as a result of the “resounding success” of the first coupon (probably solely judged by redemption quantity), Target decided to bring back this promotion 4 days later (December 7, 2011 through December 10, 2011). I’m sure someone at the corporate office was so impressed by the results, they wanted to start giving people raises and handing out trophies to stores for having the most “loyal” fans in their area.

By re-starting the promotion, you can see via this second thread which is 51 pages long with over 2000 posts, they effectively green lighted all of the original people who abused the promotion to do it again and also allowed those who missed out on the first opportunity to rob Target to join in the looting. This was a concerted effort by people who conspired to abuse this program on a national level. (Gotta love the internet!)

The thread is addicting to read. It’s like watching a train wreck reality show. It’s hard to believe that someone somewhere connected to Target isn’t watching this. In fact, based on statements made by the Slickdeals moderators, Target was aware (however minimally) of the thread since they asked SlickDeals not to post a PDF or image of the coupon. I’m sure they wanted the web traffic to their website versus to SlickDeals.

The dedication, time and effort invested by some of these people is impressive. I’m also astounded by the apparent lack of training or caring shown by the Target employees who allowed this coupon abuse as well as the failure of store management to recognize that it was happening in the first place. This failure and lack of training is obvious due to the inconsistency of success these people report experiencing. When you have to start disguising yourself, visiting multiple cashiers and you get rejected but still keep trying, an intelligent person would know that they are, at the very least, doing something wrong, even if their conscience hadn’t already told them that earlier.

Oh, and to put further emphasis on the failure of this promotion, many of the looters people, once they had collected as many free gift cards as they desired (or the promotion ended), then took all those free $10 gift cards and proceeded to buy Visa and Amex gift cards with them, thus negating them from even having to spend the free money they stole got from Target at Target. I’m sure other retailers appreciate Target’s monetary infusion into the economy and into their store’s Christmas bottom line. (Hey, I got a bunch of free Target gift cards, let’s go spend them at Wal-Mart!)

In my opinion, this tops the absurdity of the “Kindle Fire Deal That Wasn’t Supposed To Be” post I wrote a few weeks ago, and is another reason why social media promotions must be monitored and measured carefully. Just looking in your computer and seeing how many coupons were redeemed, at least in this case, isn’t an indicator of how effective the campaign was. It was an indicator of how screwed over Target got.

Merry Christmas, Target!