CHICAGO -

Cars.com recently announced the results of an analysis it performed on nearly 1 million reviews submitted by customers on its site.

According to the company’s research, seven out of 10 car shoppers said that reviews of dealerships are either a “very” or “extremely” important part of their research during the vehicle-buying process. To further elaborate on this statistic, Cars.com delved further into the topic with a text-based analysis of its consumer-submitted reviews to see what kinds of commonalities it could discover.

“Online reviews are more than social proof; they’re equity for dealerships,” said Simon Tiffen, Cars.com’s senior manager, advertiser insights. “Now that reading and writing online reviews is normal behavior for consumers, we’re able to aggregate and analyze real-life experiences to make tangible improvements to the shopping process, not to mention find out some fun stuff along the way."

One of the first big findings of the research was when customers typically complete their reviews of dealers. Cars.com data showed than over half (52 percent) of all dealer reviews were completed between 10 a.m. EST and 4 p.m., with Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday being the days of the week with the most completed. Seven percent of all reviews were made on Saturdays, and almost none were submitted between 3 a.m. and 5 a.m. EST.

“Since consumers are most likely to leave a review during midday, it makes sense for manufacturers and dealerships to capitalize on that behavior,” Tiffen said. “If you’re asking customers to submit a review, time your communication for when they’re most open to sharing, which often means during typical working hours.”

Although the average review on its site is 62 words, negative reviews (that did not recommend a dealership) were, on average, 142 percent longer than positive reviews. Although these negative reviews only make up 4 percent of all the reviews, they were 19 percent more likely to be submitted on a Saturday, Sunday or Monday, implying that the majority of bad experiences happened on a weekend trip to the dealership.

“When a consumer has a bad experience, they want their voice heard,” Tiffen said. “Businesses mess up sometimes, that’s a given. But now retailers have an opportunity to resolve individual issues as well as identify larger problems connected to dealership process through direct customer feedback.”

Cars.com recommends that dealerships pay close attention to make sure that their service quality doesn’t suffer when the business is at its busiest.

“Retailers need to pay extra attention during high-traffic hours to make sure their customer service doesn’t slip,” Tiffen said. “This includes monitoring online review and social media channels, where consumers are likely to vent after a negative experience.”

On that note of dealership response, the company’s data revealed that less than a third of all reviews on the Cars.com website are answered — which the company says can correlate with the dealerships average star rating on the site. The state with the highest rated dealerships, Delaware (with a score of 4.7 out of 5) also had the highest rate of response to reviews, at over 60 percent. To contrast, South Dakota, with the lowest average dealership rating of 3.9 out of 5, had an average response rate of less than 10 percent.

More insight from Cars.com can be found on its dealer-oriented website.