We’ve all heard some horror stories about dealers performing lousy repair and maintenance work on cars, and also some testimonials from customers whose dealers go the extra mile. But that service experience starts long before your car reaches the workshop.
First, you’ve got to book your car in for a shop visit, and a new study reveals which dealer groups handle that best, and which need to up their game. Group 1 Automotive came out top, but if you’re thinking of calling Napleton Automotive Group you might want to think about just dusting off your oil filter wrench and doing the job yourself. Translated to car brands, the winners were Acura, Lexus and Toyota, while Land Rover, Hyundai and Jeep were in a big steaming pile at the other end of the table.
The data comes from Pied Piper’s 2023 PSI Service Telephone Effectiveness Study, which measured the efficiency and quality of service telephone calls made by researchers posing as customers to 1,739 dealerships operated by the 17 largest dealer groups in the U.S.
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Each dealer was marked out of 100 by evaluating how the employee taking the call handled a request to set up a service appointment at a specific date and time. Points were awarded for efficiency and quality, the dealers being graded on things like the time elapsed before speaking to an advisor, number of days until the first available appointment, whether the customer was told how long the service would take and how much it would cost, and if they were offered alternative transport.
The STE study found that 13 percent of the dealerships scored over 80 due to “providing an effective call that quickly and easily offered an appointment.” But 20 percent scored less than 40, performing so badly that they potentially repelled the customer. More than a quarter of dealers belonging to the study’s overall champ, Group 1 Automotive, scored over 80, which looks good next to the sub-par performance of some of its rivals, but we have to wonder why any dealer in the whole study ranked less than 80 percent.