Last updated: October 23, 2026
Quick answer: Most service departments miss 20 to 30 percent of their calls, according to Marchex. At 120 calls a day, a 20 percent miss rate is about 24 missed calls a day. If one in five would have become a repair order at NADA's average of $470 in customer pay, that's roughly $47,000 to $66,000 a month in service work going somewhere else.
Every service department has a version of this Tuesday morning. Two customers at the counter. A tech waiting on a signature. And the phone ringing for the fourth time in six minutes.
The phone loses. It always loses.
That's not your advisors dropping the ball. The guy at the counter is standing right there. The guy calling in is just a sound until somebody picks up. Nobody in that room is choosing wrong.
The customer calling doesn't see any of that, though. All they get is ringing, then nothing, then a recording asking them to leave a message. Most don't. They hang up, call the next dealership, and your service department never finds out they existed.
Somewhere between one in five and one in three. Marchex tracks call data for a living, and their numbers put the miss rate for automotive service calls at 20 to 30 percent of everything that rings in. Car Wars pulled data from nearly 3,000 dealerships and found the average store connects with only about 65 percent of its callers. Everyone else is lost to hold music, voicemail, or a line that just rings out.
And plenty of those "missed" calls weren't missed at first. In the Car Wars data, 31.8 percent of callers who never reached a person hung up while on hold. Somebody picked up. The customer just gave up first.
The phone doesn't ring at random. In most stores it rings hardest in the morning, the same stretch the drive fills up with check-ins and walk-ins.
Your advisors aren't ignoring the phone because it doesn't matter. They're ignoring it because the person at the counter is standing right there, and the ringing phone is easy to put off until it isn't. Same trade, same cost, every morning.
A second wave usually hits late in the afternoon, when three different people call within ten minutes asking the same thing. Is my car ready? That's not bad luck. That's just what the end of the day looks like on a service drive.
Do this part with your own numbers, not a stock example from a blog post.
If you would rather not do it by hand, the calculators in The Cost of Silence take your repair order count and average customer pay and return the annual gap, plus what it works out to per business day.
NADA's mid-year 2025 data puts the average customer-pay repair order at $470. Say your store takes 120 calls a day. Even a conservative 20 percent miss rate works out to 24 missed calls a day, or 500 to 700 a month.
Not all of those would have become a repair order. But if even one in five would have, that's 100 to 140 ROs a month that never happened, somewhere around $47,000 to $66,000 in service revenue at that average.
Run your own call volume and your own close rate through the same math. It probably won't come out smaller than you think.
Yes. A customer's check engine light comes on at 7 PM. They call, hit a generic voicemail greeting that could belong to any business anywhere, and maybe leave a message. Maybe they don't.
The next morning, an advisor walks in to a stack of voicemails that all sound the same, listens to each one, figures out who called, digs up the RO, and calls back, usually after the customer already booked somewhere else.
It's the same problem as the daytime one, just with a longer fuse.
Hiring another person to answer phones doesn't fix a scheduling collision. You'd still have the same Tuesday morning, just with one more person competing for the same eight minutes.
Kimoby Voice, part of the Kimoby Service Lane OS, catches the calls your advisors can't get to. It knows who's calling, matches them to their open RO, and tries to route them to their own advisor. If nobody's free, it offers a message or a switch to text instead of a dead-end voicemail box. After hours, it tells the customer when they'll hear back. Every call gets logged into the customer's timeline, next to their texts and RO history, so nobody's piecing anything together from a voicemail the next morning.
What it doesn't do yet: it doesn't book appointments. It captures the request, and your advisor books it.
At Gary Moe Mazda Lethbridge, the service department was missing roughly three calls for every five repair orders it opened. In August 2026, Voice handled 224 missed calls. 98 of them were customers who wanted to open or add to a repair order, about $40,573 in service work at the store's average RO of $414. Advisors got back about 11 hours that month.
Want to see what it would catch at your store? Book a demo.
Call-analytics data from Marchex puts the miss rate at 20 to 30 percent of inbound service calls. Car Wars data from nearly 3,000 dealerships found the average store connects with only about 65 percent of its callers.
NADA's mid-year 2025 data puts the national average customer-pay repair order at $470.
Calls pile up when the service drive is busiest, usually in the morning during check-ins and walk-ins, and again late in the afternoon when customers call about pickup. Advisors can't run a full drive and answer every ring at the same time.
Many don't. In Car Wars data, 31.8 percent of callers who never reached a person hung up while on hold, and a caller who hangs up can call a competing dealership right away.
Kimoby Voice, part of the Kimoby Service Lane OS, catches missed calls, matches the caller to their open repair order, offers a switch to text, and logs an AI summary in the customer's timeline. Nothing depends on someone checking a voicemail box. It doesn't book appointments yet.
Sources
Marchex, The cost of missed connections: is your auto service desk losing revenue?
Car Wars, Connect, Convert, Close: 2024 Industry Report. Nearly 3,000 dealerships, 2024.
NADA mid-year 2025 data, as reported by Digital Dealer.
Kimoby, Gary Moe Mazda Lethbridge success story, results for August 2026.
Kimoby, The Cost of Silence: Dealership Service Report (August 2026).