REV #011: Customer Review Trends, First 7 Days of CDK Shutdown

Welcome to the REV. A briefing that goes deep into the Widewail Automotive Reputation Index data, surfacing the most interesting insights. Every 3 weeks we Rank, Explore & Visualize automotive reputation & sentiment data.?

The Index aggregates over 4.1 million Google reviews from 17k new car dealerships in the U.S. Customize the dataset like it's your own personal spreadsheet. Try it out. ?It’s free.

Read ?online.?Subscribe.

We’re now nine days post-CDK cyberattack. I’ve partnered with Widewail’s data science team to assess the impact on customer reviews from June 19th to 25th.?

It’s clear: The operational disruptions caused by the cyberattack are impacting customers.

Is this reflected in recent reviews??

Due to the narrow timeline, the data is limited.

For this research, we analyzed Widewail customer data rather than the entire market, which we typically report on in REV articles.

With that said, yes, we are noticing an impact.

We plan to update this data as the situation changes.

Negativity Up 35% Over Week Prior

Observing this data over the past three years, we’ve identified some common trends. Review negativity in the auto industry normally oscillates between 9% and 11%, depending on the season.

Typically, negativity spikes in the summer and hits a low point in the winter. But “spike” is a strong word here; it's a gentle wave.

The most dramatic movement we’ve seen was in the summer/fall of 2020, a few months into the pandemic, peaking at around 16%.

As I write this on June 27th, 2024, a week into the CDK disruption, review negativity has surpassed 13% (at Widewail, negativity means the percentage of reviews between 1-3 stars).

Negativity is up 35% from its pre-hack level and 162% from its low on March 31st.

The chart below is the 7-day rolling average, which smooths the trendline slightly, reflected in a lower peak.

Weekly Review Volume Off 17.8%

We also saw a decrease in the average weekly review volume during the final weeks of June.

The sudden drop in review volume is likely also related to the CDK outage, as downed systems prevented dealers from operating at their normal capacities.?

While we’ve seen some sizable fluctuations throughout the year, this is certainly the largest, with a 17.8% drop in volume compared to the previous week.?

We will need to wait until the cyber attack is resolved before we see the full impact that this will have on the industry.

We’ve observed some movement in topic data, specifically in mentions related to the Finance and Parts departments, which rely heavily on CDK to streamline operations.

While our data is statistically significant, we don’t yet feel confident enough in its direct relationship with CDK to report on it here. We will continue to monitor the situation and report back on our findings.?

In the meantime, we support the CDK dealer base and hope all systems will return online soon.

We plan to look at this data a few more times as the story evolves. Stay tuned.

Jake , Marketing @Widewail

Subscribe to the REV