Last updated: October 13, 2026
Quick answer: Fixed ops revenue grows when more customers come back and each repair order is worth more. The customer conversation moves both. Across 871 dealerships, ROs with a digital conversation averaged $455.08 in customer pay, against $291.12 without one, and those customers came back about 6 points more often. Part of that gap is bigger jobs creating more talk. Still, 76.3% of ROs close with no conversation at all.
Mostly from two numbers. How many customers come back to your shop, and how much each RO is worth when they do. Labor rate and parts margin matter too. You probably watch those every morning already.
This post sticks to the two numbers most stores leave on the table. Both depend on what happens between your advisor and the customer once the car is in the bay.
Fixed ops also carries the store when car sales slow down. Your absorption rate tells you how much of the dealership's fixed costs service and parts cover. Our fixed ops guide for management walks through how to calculate it.
Because they have other options, and the dealership isn't always the easy one. In Cox Automotive's 2023 Service Industry Study, dealerships handled 30% of all US service visits, down from 35% in 2021.1
That share matters beyond service. In Cox's 2018 study, 74% of owners who came back for service in the past year said they were likely to buy their next vehicle from the same dealer. Among owners who didn't come back, it was 35%.2
Here's what it looks like from your side. In our Cost of Silence report, which covers 871 dealerships and 16.8 million repair orders, strict year-over-year retention sits at 65.8%. NADA targets 72%.3 Every point of that gap is a customer who got their oil changed somewhere else.
Why do they go? Cox found cost and location are the top reasons owners skip the dealer.2 You can't move your building. You can make the visit easier, and make the price easier to say yes to.
Show the customer the work, then make it easy to approve fast. The biggest lever is the time between finding a problem and getting a yes.
When the estimate lands on the customer's phone with photos or video and line items, the median time to approval is 6 minutes. 88.2% are approved within an hour. By phone, approvals take 22 to 23 hours (industry data).3 That's a car sitting on a lift for a day while your advisor plays phone tag.
Customers want to see it, too. 64% of service customers want a photo or video with their inspection, but only 26% of mass-market customers get one.4
And it shows up in customer pay. ROs with a digital conversation averaged $455.08, against $291.12 without one. That's $163.96 per RO.3 Is all of that because of the texts? No. Bigger jobs naturally create more conversation, so part of the gap would be there anyway. But most ROs still close in silence, and that's a lot of room.
Here's what moves the RO in practice:
Stay in touch between visits, and make the visit itself feel easy. Retention is where the revenue compounds, because every customer you keep is next year's RO too.
Across the same 871 stores, customers with a digital conversation on their RO had retention about 6 points higher. Customers who received a campaign came back 9 to 10 points more often. Customers who were given a loaner came back about 7 points more often.3 Each sample is above 20,000 customers. They are still correlations, not controlled tests.
Outreach also brings back the ones who drifted. Strict retention across these stores is 65.8%. Count the customers who came back after someone reached out, and it's 73.9%, above the NADA target.
Those win-backs aren't small tickets. A customer returning after 13 months or more spends $549.28 on that visit, against $320.76 on other ROs. They usually come back with a list of deferred work. Reactivation runs 1% to 7% of RO volume, and about 4% at a typical store.
What to send them: maintenance reminders, recalls, declined work and seasonal campaigns like tire changeover. You build the audience from your DMS data, then the texts go out on schedule. Across the platform, campaigns booked 154,003 appointments and $50.5 million in attributed service revenue.3
Usually in places nobody tracks on the daily report. These are the ones we see most.
The phone. 20 to 30% of service calls go unanswered.5 Some of those callers wanted to book. We ran the numbers in Your Phone Is Losing You Money.
Advisor time. Every hour spent on confirmation calls is an hour not spent selling the work on the lift. Honda & Toyota of Seattle saved 160 hours a month on appointment confirmations by automating them. See how they did it.
The cashier line. Only 4.7% of ROs get a digital payment request.3 The rest wait at the counter at 5 PM. At Honda & Toyota of Seattle, 75% of customers now pay by phone.
Loaners. When loaner contracts live on paper, fuel and late-return fees are easy to miss. They rarely make it back onto the RO.
Shop capacity. Bigger ROs only help if your techs have the hours to do the work. If the bays are already full, fix the flow before you push more upsell.
Track the few numbers that tell you whether customers say yes and come back. Review them weekly, by advisor.
Use benchmarks with care. Domestic brands average 55% retention and imports 60%, so 72% is a stretch for most stores.3 Pick the number furthest from target and work on that one first.
We make Kimoby, so read this with that in mind.
With Kimoby, your advisors run the customer side of the visit from one screen. Texting from your store's number, video inspections, digital estimates, text-to-pay, CSI follow-up and campaigns all live in the Service Lane OS, synced to your DMS. More than 1,000 dealerships across North America have used it.
You can add modules as you need them, in any order. Kimoby Voice picks up missed calls. Kimoby Pay adds terminals and payment tied to the RO. Kimoby Go handles loaners. Kimoby Grow runs marketing and retention.
What it doesn't do yet: there's no native online scheduler. It's on the roadmap, so keep the one you have. Kimoby Voice catches missed calls, transcribes them and lets the caller switch to text, but it doesn't book appointments yet. Payment write-back to the RO works on CDK only, and estimate write-back is still in development. And no software fixes a tech shortage.
If that fits your store, book a demo. Bring your own numbers and we'll look at where your biggest gap is.
Fixed operations are the service and parts departments of the dealership, plus collision if you have a body shop. They bring in steady revenue that doesn't depend on new car sales, and they keep customers tied to the store between purchases.
NADA targets 72% year over year. Across 871 dealerships in Kimoby's Cost of Silence report, strict retention was 65.8%, or 73.9% counting reactivated customers. Domestic brands average 55% and imports 60%.
Across 871 dealerships, ROs with a digital conversation averaged $163.96 more in customer pay than ROs without one. It's a correlation, not proof that texting alone caused it, since bigger jobs naturally create more conversation.
The median is 6 minutes, and 88.2% of digital estimates are approved within an hour. Phone approvals take 22 to 23 hours, based on industry data.
Start with customers you already have. Follow up on declined work and reach out to customers who haven't been in for 13 months or more. When they return, they spend $549.28 on that visit, against $320.76 on other ROs.
Sources
[1] Cox Automotive, 2023 Service Industry Study.
[2] Cox Automotive, 2018 Service Industry Study.
[3] Kimoby, The Cost of Silence: Dealership Service Report (August 2026). 871 dealerships, 16.8 million repair orders, 12 months ending February 2026. Revenue and retention figures are observed correlations, not controlled experiments. Phone approval times are industry data cited in the report.
[4] J.D. Power, 2026, as cited in The Cost of Silence.
[5] Marchex, as cited in The Cost of Silence.