Dealership groups are improving at fielding phone calls from customers seeking service department appointments.

That’s according to a new mystery-shopping survey by Pied Piper. The consultancy says quality call handling fosters healthy profits and happy customers – as opposed to those who get miffed by long waits and other phone mishaps.

“A service customer's initial phone call is a dealership's first step toward building loyalty and generating revenue,” says Pied Piper CEO Fran O’Hagan.

In the company’s 2025 Service Telephone Effectiveness Study, eight of 10 dealer groups improved their average scores from last year’s survey.

“Dealers are improving that part of the process, without question,” O’Hagan tells WardsAuto. “Other industries we work with aren’t doing so well.”

And although it cannot do everything on its own – yet – artificial intelligence helps handle calls. But glitches persist. More on that momentarily.

Ranking highest in this year’s telephone effectiveness study is Houston-based Group 1 Automotive. It’s followed in descending order by Napleton Automotive Group (based in Chicago), Berkshire Hathaway Automotive (Dallas) and Ed Morse Automotive Group (Delray Beach, FL).

Pied Piper made service calls to 2,105 dealerships representing 26 of the largest U.S. auto dealer groups. (It did the same for 200 independent service centers.)

Each location was scored from 0-100 based on its performance in over 30 differently weighted measurements tied to best practices that are most likely to drive service revenue and customer loyalty.

Each dealer groups score is a combined average of their individual dealership performances.

The improvements largely stem from a reduced rate of negatives compared to the previous year.

Those include:

• Less Time Spent on Hold. Service customers were placed on hold for more than two minutes only 2% of the time on average this year, compared to 13% in 2024.
• Fewer “Mission Failures. The number of service customers who disconnected before the service department offered an appointment dropped from 13% last year to 9% this year.

For top-ranked Group 1, the average caller reached a service associate in 51 seconds, eight seconds faster than Group 1s performance last year and nine seconds quicker than this year’s dealer group average.

Group 1 callers were also half as likely to be placed on hold compared to the industry and were 9% less likely to experience hold times beyond two minutes.

For dealership management, some operational problems are more difficult to spot than others. A tough one is detecting how the service staff handles calls. It’s an obscure area, with shortcomings sometimes going unnoticed, O’Hagan says. “A manager can see if staffers are goofing off on the job, and do something about it,” O’Hagan says. But flawed phone handling is less overt. Trip-ups are easily overlooked. Increasing visibility leads directly to improvement.”

Some companies offer call monitoring services to dealers. Those vendors say some monitored calls can uncover glaring imperfections.

“OEMs are much more interested in dealers using their websites to schedule service,” he says. “But despite phone appointments not being sexy enough (for the OEMs to explore), two-thirds of service appointments are still scheduled by phone.”

In contrast to automakers’ take on the subject, dealership brass pays more attention to service phone-effectiveness measurements.

“Their executives know where the real money is to be made at the dealership level – aftersales,” O’Hagan says. “And the very start of that process is usually a customer phone call.”

Pied Piper plans to measure and rank dealer online service bookings this fall.

Artificial Intelligence

Using AI to handle service calls continues to grow. Pied Piper collected data comparing the experience of car dealership service customers who interacted with A.I. and those who talked to someone.

The findings are that A.I. now rivals – and often surpasses – humans in service-call quality, but it doesn’t always go right, as indicated.

AI is conversant on simple topics such as oil changes. But it can get tongue-tied if a caller asks about complicated work, such as a transmission fix or how to respond if told a “check engine” light is on.

Of dealerships using A.I. to take service-related phone calls, 91% were handled successfully, including addressing the customer’s request to schedule an appointment, without relying on an employee, says Cameron OHagan, Pied Piper’s vice president – metrics and analytics.

But he tells WardsAuto that the transfer is often fumbled when A.I. can’t fully handle the call. “Who’s at fault?” he says. “It’s kind of both sides. Sometimes, someone is not there to take the call. If the customer is on hold for 80 seconds or more, they often hang up.”

Fran O’Hagan says that at this stage of technological development, it’s unreasonable to expect A.I. to do all. “I’d hesitate to throw stones at A.I.”

It’s not a hands-off system at this point, says Cameron O’Hagan.

In the study, A.I. couldn’t handle a customer request 9% of the time. When attempting to transfer to a human, those handoffs failed 56% of the time.

Typical issues included requiring the customer to call back later, being sent to voicemail and going into “hold mode.” Some calls were dropped during botched transfers.

The average A.I. handoff to a human occurred 88 seconds into the call. “A.I. now often outperforms human staff on service calls, but handoffs to people frequently fall apart,” says Cameron OHagan.

He recommends that dealers use A.I. as “a tool, not a crutch.”