What's Working in Auto

Widewail

What's Working in Auto looks for the dealerships with the best reviews in the country and tells their story. How do they run the business to make customers happy? So happy they praise the experience in reviews? Powered by the Widewail Index, host Jake Hughes, Widewail Director of Marketing, finds the leaders in customer experience, the groups and stores that stand out in the eyes of their customers, and brings the people who run them on to explain what is happening behind the feedback. The conversations are operational. How the work gets done day to day, what got standardized, what still comes down to one person doing the right thing, what they tried that did not work, and what a peer could put to use this quarter. Dealers teaching dealers, in 20 to 30 minutes. Made for operators, GMs, fixed ops directors and marketing leaders who want to hear what worked from the people it worked for. Hosted by Widewail Customer intelligence for automotive retail widewail.com

Episodes

  1. 1d ago

    What Comes After Reputation Management with Cuyler Owens

    Reputation management is no longer a strategy. It's table stakes. That's where Widewail CEO Cuyler Owens starts, and he doesn't mean reputation stopped mattering. He means the hard part moved. Asking for reviews, responding to them, showing up in search and now in answer engines: every operator serious about this business is already doing it. So the question becomes what else all that feedback is good for. His answer is that dealership decisions have run on two inputs, the numbers coming out of the DMS and what the staff says they need, and that the customer's own voice has been the missing third. Not because nobody wanted it, but because free-text feedback at scale was unreadable until recently. In this conversation he walks through what changes when review content gets connected to DMS transaction data, what a dealer can learn from what sits behind a competitor's five-star rating, why he'd take an open-ended review over a survey, and why he thinks this data ends up in front of every role in a store rather than sitting in marketing. Three things you'll take away: What happens when you tie a review to the repair order: matching went from roughly 7% of transactions to more than half, which turns a handful of coaching conversations into dozensWhat competitive benchmarking makes visible, and why a high rating tells you the result without telling you the causeWhy an open-ended question beats a leading one, and where surveys still hold their place Cuyler Owens is CEO of Widewail. His first job out of college was running an Enterprise desk inside the service drive of a Mazda store in Austin. He later built Dealerware out of the Silvercar platform, reaching roughly 4,000 dealerships over six years, and served as CRO of the B2B review site TrustRadius before joining Widewail. Learn more about Customer Clarity: https://www.widewail.com/clarity

  2. Sep 2

    How Garber became the highest-rated dealer group in America | Robert Norcross, Marketing Director

    We ranked the 150 largest dealer groups in the country by group-level Google rating. Garber Automotive Group came out first, at a 4.9. So we asked their marketing director how. Robert Norcross has been building Garber's reputation program from the inside for over a decade, and his answer starts somewhere unexpected: the group that would win the industry benchmark is the one that refuses to use it. In this conversation, he walks through the app his team built in-house to make review requests automatic, the weekly store-versus-store ranking that actually changes what happens on the floor, why he treats the industry average as a ceiling instead of a target, and where he thinks the biggest untapped opportunity in dealer reputation is sitting. Three things you'll take away: The system Garber built to make review requests automatic at the point of deliveryWhy Robert throws out the industry average, and what he tracks insteadThe opportunity he thinks the whole industry is sitting on: the service drive Robert Norcross is Marketing Director at Garber Automotive Group, a third-generation family group founded in 1907 that runs 25 new-car dealerships across six states, plus roughly 50 RightWay Auto Sales locations. Ratings from the Widewail Index, our database of 20M+ customer reviews across US auto retail. Subscribe to our weekly data newsletter based on the Index, the REV. widewail.com/rev Garber is a Widewail client, and we are proud to work with them.

  • 2 Episodes

About

What's Working in Auto looks for the dealerships with the best reviews in the country and tells their story. How do they run the business to make customers happy? So happy they praise the experience in reviews? Powered by the Widewail Index, host Jake Hughes, Widewail Director of Marketing, finds the leaders in customer experience, the groups and stores that stand out in the eyes of their customers, and brings the people who run them on to explain what is happening behind the feedback. The conversations are operational. How the work gets done day to day, what got standardized, what still comes down to one person doing the right thing, what they tried that did not work, and what a peer could put to use this quarter. Dealers teaching dealers, in 20 to 30 minutes. Made for operators, GMs, fixed ops directors and marketing leaders who want to hear what worked from the people it worked for. Hosted by Widewail Customer intelligence for automotive retail widewail.com

Information

  • Creator
    Widewail
  • Years Active
    2026
  • Episodes
    2
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Copyright
    © 2026 Widewail