Most service departments have a communication problem, and most of them don't know how bad it is. Poor communication is one of the biggest driver of negative dealership reviews, cited in 37% of them according to Widewail's Voice of the Customer report.
You might think that the fix is more phone calls. It's not. It's fewer. Dealerships that improve service department communication do five things:
Key takeaways:
We've been in this industry for over 12 years. We've sat in more service drives than we can count. And here's the thing: every single one of them has a communication problem. The good ones know it. The great ones have fixed it. The rest are leaking money and don't fully understand why.
When a service manager tells us their CSI is tanking, their advisors are burned out, or their CP/RO numbers are soft, nine times out of ten the root cause is the same thing: communication.
Here's the thing: fixing it isn't complicated.
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An advisor is on the phone. There's a line of customers at the counter. The phone rings, the advisor puts it on hold, writes a note on a sticky, and picks up the next call. A tech walks up wanting to clarify a repair. The advisor waves him off, still on the phone. The customer at the counter is getting annoyed. Somewhere, a $1,500 approval is sitting in voicemail, and nobody's going to hear it until 3 PM.
This is normal. This is how most service drives run. And it's insane.
The reason it's broken isn't because your advisors are bad. They're doing the best they can with the tools they have. The reason it's broken is that the whole model assumes the phone is still the primary channel. It's not. It hasn't been for a decade.
The J.D. Power 2025 CSI Study confirms that communication shortfalls are one of the top three pain points dragging down service satisfaction, alongside appointment wait times and first-time fix rates. Widewail's 2023 Voice of the Customer report goes further: 37% of negative reviews cite poor communication as the core issue, more than any other category, including pricing complaints (20.7%).
More than one in three angry customers is angry specifically because you couldn't reach them, didn't update them, or made them chase you. That's a fixable problem. And every 1-star review it generates costs you measurably in CSI, repeat visits, and new-customer acquisition.
So what do you actually do about it? Six things.
Phone tag is a tax.
Every minute your advisor spends leaving a voicemail, waiting for a callback, and re-explaining the same recommendation is a minute they're not writing work or moving the next customer through.
The math is brutal. A typical advisor loses 90 minutes a day to phone tag. That's 7.5 hours per advisor per week. In a 5-advisor shop, you're down 37.5 hours every week. Almost a full-time employee, gone to voicemail.
The fix is straightforward. Every routine communication that can happen via text should happen via text. Appointment confirmations, reminders, status updates, approval requests, vehicle-ready notifications, pickup instructions. None of these require a phone call. Most customers prefer it that way.
Save the phone for the hard conversations. Diagnosing something complex. Delivering unexpected news. Rebuilding trust with a frustrated customer. That's where your advisors add real value.
The numbers on this are hard to argue with. SMS has a 98% open rate, and 90% of texts are read within 3 minutes (Optimonk 2026, Infobip 2025). Compare that to voicemail, which half your customers don't even check anymore.
When you switch routine communication to text, three things happen:
One thing to flag: don't let your team text from personal cell phones. Big liability. No audit trail, no consent tracking, and when an advisor leaves, the customer relationship walks out the door with them. Use a real dealership SMS platform that integrates with your DMS.
This is the biggest single upgrade most service departments can make. Most still aren't doing it.
Customers don't trust your advisor when they call and say "you need brakes." Of course they don't. They've been burned before. Every customer walks in defensive, half-expecting to hear they need $1,200 in work they don't actually need.
Send a 30-second video of the tech pointing at the worn brake pads, and the whole dynamic changes. They can see it. They don't need to trust you on faith. Approval rates on recommended work more than double when customers get visual evidence: 24% without video, 51% with (J.D. Power 2024 ASI).
Here's what's wild. 64% of customers say they want photo or video documentation with their MPI. Only 26% of mass market and 44% of premium customers actually get it (J.D. Power 2026 CSI).
That's a massive gap between what customers want and what dealers are delivering. Close it, and you're out ahead of most of your competition by default.
Every dealership we work with that implements video MPI sees the same pattern. Approval rates climb. CSI climbs. Advisors spend less time defending recommendations.
Your advisors shouldn't be manually sending appointment reminders. They shouldn't be manually confirming appointments the day before. They shouldn't be manually sending "your car is ready" texts. These are the easiest things in the world to automate, and every minute spent on them is stolen from higher-value work.
Honda & Toyota of Seattle is a good example. Two high-volume stores, 90 to 150 cars a day. They were drowning in phone calls. They automated appointment confirmations, reminders, advisor introductions, status updates, and payment requests.
The result: 160+ staff hours saved every month on reminders alone. That's the equivalent of a full-time employee. More than 75% of customers now pay from their phones before picking up the car, which killed the 5 PM cashier line. They handle more cars without adding headcount. (Full case study here.)
That's the real payoff with automation. It's not just that you save time. You unlock capacity.
Walk into any service advisor's workstation and count the applications open on their screen.
DMS. Email. Texting tool (maybe personal phone). Scheduling. Separate app for video. CRM for sales follow-up. Another tool for payments. Another one for loaner tracking.
Every context switch costs the advisor time. When systems don't talk to each other, the advisor ends up retyping the same customer info three times. Something always falls through the cracks.
The dealerships that nail communication are the ones that consolidated. They run their service lane off one integrated platform that sits on top of the DMS and handles the whole workflow: texting, video, estimates, payments, loaner management, reporting. Everything tied to the same customer record.
This is what we built Kimoby to do. It's a Dealership Engagement System (DES) that sits on top of your DMS and handles every customer touchpoint in one place. Advisors stop juggling tabs, stop retyping customer data, and stop wondering whether Joe ever got around to calling that customer back.
External communication gets all the attention. Internal communication kills just as many ROs.
Here's how it usually goes. A tech finds something during the MPI. He walks over to the advisor to flag it. Advisor is on the phone. Tech waits, gives up, writes it on a sticky note, leaves it on the desk. Advisor gets the message 40 minutes later, and by then the customer is already at home. Now it's a phone call instead of a text, happening after the car has been on the hoist for an extra hour.
The same tools that fix external communication should fix this too. Techs and advisors working off the same platform. Tech records a 30-second video, pushes it to the advisor's feed, advisor pushes it to the customer. The sticky notes and the back-and-forth between the bay and the counter disappear.
When your service department runs on one shared communication layer, everything moves faster. Parts counter, techs, advisors, cashier, service manager. Everybody on the same thread, seeing the same customer record, handing off cleanly.
A store that fixes its communication sees measurable wins across four areas:
For a store doing 1,500 ROs a month at $222 CP gross per RO (the 2024 industry average per Optimum), even a modest 5-point lift in approval rate is tens of thousands of dollars a month in incremental gross.
That's the business case.
Phone tag. Advisors spending half their day leaving voicemails and waiting for callbacks. It's the single biggest drag on approval rates, bay turnover, and advisor morale in the average service drive. Every routine conversation that can happen by text should happen by text.
For most routine updates, yes. Customers can respond when they have a minute, which usually means a few minutes after you send the text instead of the next day when they get around to voicemail. The advisor gets a faster answer, the customer doesn't have to stop what they're doing, and nobody's stuck on hold. The phone still has its place for complex diagnostics and difficult conversations. It just shouldn't be the default for "your car is ready."
More than most service managers expect. The Honda & Toyota of Seattle example (160+ hours a month) is on the higher end, but it's a high-volume store. A typical single-rooftop franchise store usually sees the equivalent of one or two full-time employees' worth of time come back within a few weeks of rollout. The biggest wins come from appointment confirmations and vehicle-ready notifications, because those are the highest-volume repetitive tasks.
Technically yes, but it's a bad idea. Personal phones create TCPA exposure, leave you with no record of customer consent, and take the customer relationship with the advisor when they leave for another store. A dealership-grade SMS platform keeps every conversation tied to the store and integrated with the DMS.
It means your texting, video, estimates, payments, and DMS all share one customer record. Instead of an advisor logging into four tools and retyping the same info each time, everything lives in one thread tied to the RO. That's the core of what a Dealership Engagement System like Kimoby does.
Pick tools that save the advisor time in the first week. The ones that fail are usually the ones that add steps to the workflow instead of removing them. If your team needs two days of training to use something, they'll quietly stop using it by week three. The best test is simple: ask an advisor to use it for a morning. If they're still using it that afternoon without being told to, you've picked the right tool.
Track it for a week. Have your advisors log how much time they spend on voicemails, callbacks, and chasing customers. The number is almost always higher than managers think, and seeing the real baseline is what makes the business case obvious to whoever needs to sign off. From there, appointment reminders are usually the easiest first automation to put in place. You can be live in days.
Communication is the single biggest lever a service manager has. Most stores are leaving it on the floor.
You don't need to hire more people, buy more bays, or renovate the drive. What you need is to stop using the phone for things that should be a text, send video instead of trying to explain a bad belt over the phone, automate the stuff a computer can handle, and cut the number of systems your advisors have to juggle.
Most stores haven't done it yet. The ones that have are pulling ahead.
If you want to see what this looks like in your specific shop, book a demo. We'll walk you through what's working at stores like yours and figure out whether it makes sense for you.