What We Learned from 200+ Car Dealer Service Department Mystery Shops
What We Learned from 200+ Car Dealer Service Department Mystery Shops
Our team has conducted over 200 service mystery shops so far this year, and the great news is most were handled properly. Our shops included phone calls, chats, contact forms, and service schedulers – all with the goal of efficiently setting a service appointment with the dealership.
Of course, if everything went smoothly, I wouldn’t be writing about it would I?
Let’s review the results of these 200+ shops in order of best-handled to worst-handled.
Service Phone Calls
The great news is that of the scores of calls we made to schedule service, just two resulted in hold times longer than 90 seconds – one kept us on hold for just under three minutes before picking up, though another dealership kept us on hold for over nine minutes before we eventually hung up (no voicemail option?). (Studies have shown that people begin to hang up after 90 seconds on hold, and about a third of those who hang up simply won’t call back.)
We connected with someone in the service department with nearly every call; and nearly all these calls were handled by friendly voices, and the dealership employees were considered helpful by our shoppers.
However, when we didn’t reach a live person and were instead dumped into voicemail, the chances of getting a call back were less than 50/50. Yes, you read that correctly. Despite leaving a name and working phone number with a message that we’d like to schedule service, fewer than half of these service department voicemails were returned.
We also experienced a few issues with some of the connected service calls we made. These included:
- Multiple dealership employees who told us “It’s probably just a loose gas cap” when we explained that we had a check engine light on and wanted to schedule service. (Yikes! Imagine the lost revenue and the potential liability if the issue turns out to be more than a loose gas cap!)
- A small fraction of the dealership service employees we spoke with were simply not friendly to our shoppers. Described by our shoppers as everything from “she seemed like she was having a bad day” to “he seemed like he didn’t want to be there.” (While these are minor customer experience annoyances to most people, your team’s tone matters. Customers want to feel appreciated, and when they don’t, they are less likely to spend money with you in the future.)
Online Service Schedulers
The great news here is that roughly 90% of the online service schedulers we used were functioning properly and allowed us to (relatively) quickly schedule a service appointment. However, many of these online tools presented the customer with multiple scroll bars – a silly issue given how easily this can be resolved by an attentive website vendor.
The bigger issue with some of the easy-to-use tools was the inability to see the next available appointment via a single click. This isn’t a problem for customers if you’ve got open times this week, but some service departments showed no openings for months. Yes, months! And because their tools make the customer view week-by-week availability, we gave up if we scrolled through more than 60 days of no availability. (How far into the future would your average customer look for a service appointment?)
Interestingly, we found that every dealership showing nothing available for thirty days or more via their online scheduler was able to find appointment openings within the next two weeks when we phoned to schedule service. (Are the rules intentionally strict for their online service scheduler? That is, do they deliberately set the scheduler to throttle availability for fear of overloading the shop? Or, more likely, do they have more capacity today than when they first configured their schedulers?)
Online Chat
Using online chat to try to schedule service was difficult (at best) for most of these shops. From “AI” chatbots that had no real clue what we were trying to accomplish to remote chat agents who provided little to no help, our shoppers concluded that providing a chat option was a net negative for most dealerships’ potential service business.
A few remote chat agents were helpful and put the link to the dealership’s service scheduler in the chat, though most just gave us the service department’s phone number and told us to call. (If the customer wanted to call the dealership, they wouldn’t have used the chat feature to try to schedule an appointment.)
When they did gather our information to pass to the dealership, the responses ranged from a quick call from a service team member to no further communication. Yes, we were essentially ghosted after providing contact information to remote chat agents.
In-house dealership chat agents performed much better, with most of them gathering the required customer information and scheduling the service via chat. (This occurred with fewer than 10% of the total chat service shops we performed, unfortunately.)
Contact Us Form
All but one dealer we shopped had some version of a Contact Us form on their website. While a few of the forms were very hard to find on some sites, most were located exactly where a potential customer would expect. Some Contact Us forms even provided a drop-down field where we were able to choose between Service, Sales, and Parts.
That drop-down option was nice, but it didn’t seem to matter.
Over 30% of the Contact Us forms we submitted received no response – not even an auto-response. Our contact information and our desire to do business with these dealerships just disappeared into some mysterious black hole.
For those form submissions that did generate a response from the dealership, nearly all were from their sales departments with promises to help us find the perfect vehicle. Some ambitious salespeople even left multiple voicemails and sent multiple texts and emails in their quest to help us buy. (Hint: They never bothered to read the lead. Had they done so, they would’ve forwarded our request to the service team.)
Some salespeople who received these communications as leads did respond that they would forward our request to their respective service departments. However, as was the case with voicemails we left for service teams, we received a follow-up message from the service department in less than half of these instances. (Oh well, they tried.)
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The good news is that we were able to easily schedule service with more than two-thirds of our attempts. Of course, that’s also the bad news. Our success rate should’ve been closer to 100% – with just one or two “outliers” because of short staffing or other temporary issues.
As inventories increase and sales grosses contract, the importance of Fixed Operations to the average dealership’s net profit grows. Moreover, because loyal service customers are more likely to become loyal sales customers, when your service team makes it difficult for someone to become a loyal service customer with you, your potential future sales to these prospects will be harder to come by (and much more expensive).
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If you’re interested in having our team mystery shop your service department, feel free to contact Steve directly on stevestauning.com.
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