How does AutoDeal ensure its buyer reviews are legit?

Visitors to AutoDeal may have been seeing stars recently, as our new buyer testimonial feature enables prospective buyers to read reviews and ratings on dealerships and sales agents.

Related: 5 things we noticed from car buyers during Q1 2018

At AutoDeal, understanding our customer is very important to us, and we invest a number of resources into ensuring that our processes are best aligned with the expectations of our users. One of the newest methods that we have decided to deploy is our buyer reviews.

Through this feature, we have provided customers who have bought a vehicle using AutoDeal to post a review about their experience with the dealer and sales representative that they purchased through. Reviews contain a test and star rating, and each is moderated for quality through a variety of automatic and manual processes thanks to our post-purchase review technology.

As new reviews come onto our platform every day, one of the most common questions that we get is: how do we ensure that the testimonials are legit?

Here are a few methods that we employ to ensure that our users only get to see relevant and trustworthy buyer reviews.

1. Testimonials are generated by confirmed buyers only.

Our buyer review form is only distributed to consumers upon confirmation of a completed purchase. This occurs when the sales agent declares the customer as sold through their Lead Management System (LMS), which is used by all dealers participating on AutoDeal. Once the sale is complete, an e-mail is triggered and sent to the customer which redirects them to a unique URL to input their feedback. This process significantly reduces the opportunity for dealers or agents to create fake reviews.

2. Moderation

Once a review is generated on AutoDeal, it passes through to our moderating team who conduct several quality checks. These include processes to check authenticity and to ensure content quality.