Press

Each of Napleton Automotive Group’s 50 dealerships has a unique number to schedule a service appointment. Last year, it began routing those calls through its centralized business development center (BDC). Technology alerts the BDC specialist to which store the customer is trying to reach but any specialist can answer a call for any store, creating a seamless customer experience. It had another important result, as well.

“It reduced the time to speak to an actual person,” Brian Napleton, the group’s director of operations, tells WardsAuto.

Such telephone effectiveness in a dealership’s service department plays an outsized role in overall customer satisfaction and, ultimately, customer loyalty, says Chris Sutton, vice president of automotive retail at J.D. Power.

“Over the years, people always ask us what the individual variables that connect with the best Customer Satisfaction Index scores are,” says Sutton. “Bizarrely, the one we identified that had an incredibly strong relationship was the number of rings and time it took to make a service appointment.”

Despite the plethora of software platforms that allow a customer to schedule a service appointment without talking to a human being, in the 2024 CSI survey J.D. Power found 68% of customers still make the appointment over the phone, Sutton says.

The online scheduling rate has “hovered around 20% for a long time,” he says.

Napleton created the centralized service appointment process after finishing last in the 2023 Pied Piper Service Telephone Effectiveness Study. His strategy shift worked. This year the store jumped to second place on the list.