GM Mystery Shopper Scorecard Questions and Comments

Here are the questions and real comments from GM showing how they graded our email and phone calls this past month during one of GM's mystery shops. This is a real critque form titled "Sales Mystery Shop - Internet Inquiry" (once at the form, scroll to the bottom to see the left to right scroll bar) completed by GM on our performance for one of our lead management clients. I apologize to DealerElite for sharing this link to Auto iLead's website, but this is a pdf document that is too big to share as a picture on here. If you click the link, please don't spend too much time on our little outsourced bdc website. My hope is that you will read the questions and comments posted by GM's mystery shopper and then return to share your thoughts on the fairness of the questions used to evaluate internet professionals across the United States.

To set the stage, this is for a new car lead referencing a new Volt. Our client is a multi-franchise store with about 75 new GM vehicles not including other brands and pre-owned inventory. We did not have a Volt to demo at the time of the mystery shop. The only alterations made are the blocks over the BAC and dealer information.

Any thoughts regarding questions or GM's process are welcome. I look forward to sharing ideas with everyone.

Jason Mickelson
Auto iLead

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Comment by Jason Mickelson on April 6, 2013 at 2:46pm: What do you think about the fairness of the section referring to the EMAIL RESPONSE where it says:

What could be improved: (mystery shopper comment) I was not sure if the appointment she wanted to schedule was on the phone or at the dealership.

In our operation at Auto iLead, I keep the type of appointment vague by design in the initial email response. I really don't care if they want a phone appointment or an appointment to visit us. Is there a reason you would ask for a specific appointment?

Comment by Jason Mickelson on April 4, 2013 at 9:49am: Stan, thanks for the comments! I agree with your points. One thing that I am impressed with was the quality of the call. I personally handled this call on the phone and it was an enjoyable car. Krista handled herself in a way that made me believe she was a car buyer. Our team handles a couple of Toyota stores and we find it weird that they only mystery shop the email and we never get to talk to the customer. Toyota mystery shops are easy to spot because they lack a phone number and ask a couple of off-the-wall questions in the initial inquiry. In my opinion, the phone is even more important than the email (which is VERY important) and yet Toyota isn't assisting their dealers with feedback on phone skills.

Great job GM for offering a real evaluation that is in depth and offers fantastic insight for the dealer. I do not like wasting time on these, but these exercises have their place and we are able to learn from them when they are done like this by high-quality people.

Comment by Stan Sher on April 4, 2013 at 6:24am: Great hare. Thanks for this. There are things on this form that grind my gears.

Website design and Website navigation? Since all GM websites for the most part are the same I would imagine that the report should have the same exact settings picked out on this form.

However, the report has great information that a strong dealership can use to really tighten up their processes. My advice to dealerships is to use this to create a benchmark for internet sales success. Once you establish your own set processes to satisfy GM in this case use that and implement in all of your marketing strategies.