J.D. Power Teams with DealerRater to Combine Automotive Customer Insights and Accelerate Feedback to Automotive Dealers

WESTLAKE VILLAGE, CA--March 19, 2014: J.D. Power and DealerRater today announced an alliance to integrate each company's capabilities in order to quickly provide comprehensive vehicle shopper feedback to automotive dealers.

J.D. Power is a global marketing information services company best known for its Voice of the Customer research. The company's quality and satisfaction measurements are based on responses from millions of verified automobile owners annually. J.D. Power's research provides automotive manufacturers and dealers with detailed feedback on vehicle quality and the sales and service customer experience.

DealerRater is a leading online destination for consumer reviews of automotive dealerships worldwide. More than 9.5 million consumers visit the company's website annually to search for car dealerships, read reviews, write their own descriptive reviews and find car deals—all for free. Consumers can rate dealers on the criteria of customer service, quality of work, friendliness, price and overall experience. The company improves the car-buying experience for consumers, while also creating a way for automotive dealers to improve and merchandise their quality of customer service and overall reputation.

The alliance will integrate DealerRater's customer ratings and reviews of car dealerships with J.D. Power's customer satisfaction insights via J.D. Power's customer experience management platform. Dealers will be able to see and analyze their online reputation as reported by DealerRater side-by-side with J.D. Power's survey-based customer feedback.

"We are excited to work with DealerRater to provide automakers and dealers with fast and comprehensive insights delivered through our new industry-leading online reporting platform," said Mike Battaglia, senior director of automotive retail at J.D. Power. "Where J.D. Power provides detailed operational information to manufacturers and dealers, DealerRater represents the magnified voice of customers across the Web in this age of social media. Further, this relationship protects our clients by avoiding the potential intellectual property issues associated with scraping online social media content without permission."

"Our consumer-written reviews serve many purposes, which includes helping consumers find the best place to buy a car and enabling dealers to understand what their customers are looking for in the car-shopping experience," said Chip Grueter, founder and chief technology architect of DealerRater. "This integration will help make the process of gathering feedback easier for dealers and consumers by merging survey and review collection into one seamless process. Publishing this valuable feedback on DealerRater will give car shoppers the resources they need to make a confident purchase decision, while pinpointing how dealers can meet consumer needs. In short, we can help foster better relationships between dealerships and their customers."

Customers who receive an automotive survey from J.D. Power will have an opportunity at the end of the questionnaire to post a rating and review of their selling or servicing dealership to the DealerRater website. In addition to the rich content that already resides within the DealerRater database, these public reviews will then feed back into the J.D. Power platform for reporting at both the dealer and manufacturer levels. Through this integration, dealers will have the opportunity to respond immediately to customers' reviews to resolve customer issues while gaining a better understanding of their online reputation.

J.D. Power and DealerRater officials said the two companies have already begun working together to provide customer insights to automakers and dealers.