Poor communication is gutting service retention faster than any bad repair.
The details: At this year’s National Association of Minority Auto Dealers conference, Derek Simonds, EVP of Automotive with Numa, broke down the communication issues stacking up in service departments.
Per his stats, here’s what this looks like inside a typical store:
80%+ of advisor calls go unanswered, especially on Monday mornings when traffic spikes.
The average service advisor takes 23 hours to return a call.
And nearly 40% of inbound calls are customers chasing a status update that should’ve been proactive.
“If a customer has to call us for a status update, we’ve already failed them,” he told the audience.
Derek Simonds
Why: Because communication drives satisfaction, and satisfaction drives retention.
And the proof is in the data…
“If you can get a customer in your dealership two times a year, there’s an 80% chance that you can sell them their next car,” Simonds said. “When the customer is there zero times per year, it goes down to like 18%.”
He added, “There's an adage, it's a cliché…but it's ‘sales sells the first car, service sells the second.’”
But here’s the problem: Even if advisors want to close that gap, the system isn’t always set up to help them.
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Take pay plans.
“When you look at [pay plans] and you talk about retention, does your pay plan necessarily align with this concept of retention? This is a challenge,” Simonds said.
The challenge: Advisors often get paid on short-cycle profit, while service managers get paid monthly on net.
Neither structure inherently rewards them to think about long-term loyalty.
And when that gap shows up in the lane, it often starts with something small, like tires.
As Simonds put it: “If we lose a customer to another tire company, what happens then? They give them free rotations, right? Why do they do that? Because every time they come in for an oil change, they take the wheels off, they want to see the brakes, they want to upsell the brakes and the suspension. We can’t lose that.”
From there, fewer service visits mean fewer showroom deals down the road, an issue that a customer satisfaction index (CSI) score can’t fix after the fact.
In his words: “The problem with CSI is it's kind of like game day. It's already happened. You already got a bad score. We can coach it, we can learn, we can do things. But the reality is, we need to be taking action while it is happening. So we're not just putting out fires after this happens.”
Bottom line: Communication is the hinge point. And it’s damaging retention more than any bad repair. Dealers who close that gap, whether through tighter processes, rethinking pay plans, or tech support, are more likely to protect gross, CSI, and future sales.
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