Welcome to Car Dealership Guy “From the Show”—9 questions. 9 answers. Insights from our latest CDG Industry Spotlight Podcast.
Today’s guest is Cuyler Owens, CEO of Widewail, a customer reputation and review intelligence company that works with thousands of dealership rooftops nationwide.
He built software companies before coming into automotive, and now works alongside a market advisory board of dealer principals to turn millions of customer reviews into staff coaching, training, and revenue decisions.
Levi: How did you end up focused on customer reviews and sentiment as a lever for dealership performance?
Owens: "So, curiosity, right? If you look all the way back at Widewail's business model and the way we started, it was essentially how do you get more reviews and how are we helping you respond to those reviews and do it in the right way... the curiosity piece sparked about three years ago, where we started collecting every review for every franchise dealer across the United States... using AI to tag sentiment, understand that analysis and then start benchmarking the entire industry."
Levi: With AI-driven search—ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude—increasingly part of how consumers find a dealership, what actually matters now?
Owens: "The searches that are coming from answer engines like Gemini, Claude, GPT, all of those that are out there is looking for recency, volume, and response rate... forever SEO has been the game for driving traffic and now AEO is really moving to a point where the citations are not your website, what you're publishing, what you're talking about. The citations are all what other people are saying on other forums about you."
Levi: Can you make that concrete—what does that actually look like for a shopper?
Owens: "I opened ChatGPT and I actually had it recording her going through this list of her requirements right before she would go into a place... it immediately spat out two—we had two manufacturers that we were searching through—and it said most recent reviews cite this as low pressure, quick to do a test drive, highly responsive to text messages, aren't going to call you a lot."
Levi: What are the best-performing dealer groups actually doing differently?
Owens: "I'll reference David Hult as a great example. I know that he reads, or did read when he was sitting in seat, every single review that was below a four for every store every week... that's a huge time commitment."
Levi: You mentioned a "silent satisfied" customer segment. What's that, and why does it matter?
Owens: "There's for a long time in the industry been this sentiment that like only angry customers get on and write reviews... but the vast majority of those that are coming into your dealership sit in that middle. We call that the silent satisfied... those that are focusing on getting everyone to leave feedback... that's a miss, right?"
Presented by:
1. Digital Dealer - Join us September 22–23 in Detroit and register today at DigitalDealer.com. Use code CDG25OFF at checkout and bring your team for a generous discount. Visit @ here for more info.
2. Podium - the AI platform trusted by one in three dealerships. It’s time to take a closer look @ here.
3. Widewail - Leading dealerships aren’t choosing between profit and customer experience. They’re learning to balance both. Read the full report here @ here.
Levi: Where does reputation management typically sit in a dealership, and is that a mistake?
Owens: "In almost every dealership and almost every organization, when we talk about reputation management, it lives with marketing, and I think that's a mistake... what I think has been missing is fixed ops directors leaning in... on the F&I side there's another opportunity—38% of the negative reviews that we see are focused on F&I and we have very few F&I contacts that are like, ‘Yeah, I'm dialed into what customers are saying.’"
Levi: You're not a fan of CSI. Why not?
Owens: "The second that you put incentives behind a survey process, that is a biased data set. Because no matter what you say… if this is tied to your compensation, you're going to manage it."
Levi: Dealers hear "another dashboard, another password" and get skeptical. What's the actual time commitment?
Owens: "For us, the goal was to get to a point where a snapshot weekly of 10 minutes from a GM is our focus and that's all we would ask... the request for feedback that comes in... is automated. So that automatically happens every time an RO closes, every time you sell a car."
Levi: Does any of this actually move the P&L?
Owens: "In luxury stores when the top 25% of communication, the average RO is $170 higher than the rest... people spend more money because they trust what's going on. They trust the staff that they're working with."
