Kimoby Industry Report
The Cost of Silence
What dealership service departments lose when the customer hears nothing. An analysis of 747 dealerships, 16.5 million repair orders, and $5.65 billion in service revenue.
Published August 2026 · Platform data covers the 12 months ending February 2026
Key findings
- Digital estimates are approved in a median of 6 minutes. Phone-based approvals average 22 to 23 hours.
- Repair orders with a digital customer conversation averaged $452.79 in customer pay, against $293.12 without one. A gap of $159.67 per repair order.
- 77.2% of repair orders across the platform still close with no digital conversation attached.
- 64% of service customers want photo or video with their inspection. Only 26% of mass-market customers receive it (J.D. Power, 2026).
- 399,343 customers gone 13 months or longer were brought back through proactive outreach.
- At the 90th percentile, revenue attributable to closing these gaps runs to $1.7 million per rooftop annually.
Six minutes.
That is the median time it takes a service customer to approve additional work when the estimate arrives on their phone. Industry data puts the phone-based average at 22 to 23 hours.
Same customer. Same repair. Same money on the line. The only variable is whether they could see what you were talking about.
Where the silence happens
A repair order passes through six moments where the dealership either says something or does not. This report prices each one. Keep scrolling, they advance one at a time.
20–30% unanswered
4 of 5 ROs touched by a missed call
64% want photo or video, 26% get it
6 minutes against 23 hours
4.7% of ROs get a payment request
399,343 lapsed customers recovered
Moment 1 of 6
It starts before the repair order exists
Between a fifth and a third of inbound service calls go unanswered, clustered in the morning drop-off window when advisors are least able to pick up. A missed call leaves no record. It is not a declined estimate or a lost RO. It is nothing at all, which is why it has gone unpriced for so long.
Marchex call analytics.
The write-up inherits whatever the phone lost
At one store that started counting, four out of five repair orders had involved at least one missed call. Nobody at the dealership knew that until something measured it.
Gary Moe Mazda Lethbridge, after deploying Kimoby Voice.
The technician finds something, and the customer cannot see it
64% of service customers want photo or video documentation with their multi-point inspection. Among mass-market brands, 26% receive it. Two out of three are asking for something three out of four are not getting.
J.D. Power 2026 U.S. Customer Service Index Study.
The approval is where hours disappear
A digital estimate with photos and one-tap approval comes back in a median of six minutes. A phone-based approval averages 22 to 23 hours of voicemail while the car sits on a lift and the bay stays blocked.
Platform median against industry average.
Payment adds friction nobody counts
Only 4.7% of repair orders currently trigger a digital payment request, even among stores that have the capability switched on. Everything else means a counter visit or a card number read aloud, 15 to 30 minutes at a time.
Platform data, 12 months.
And then the silence keeps costing
Declined work nobody follows up on. Customers who stop coming and never complain. 399,343 people who had been gone thirteen months or longer came back once somebody reached out. By any standard definition those were lost.
Platform data, 12 months across 747 dealerships.
Most dealerships have never measured this, because the systems they run on were not built to measure it. A DMS records that a repair order opened at 9:14 and closed at 4:47. It has nothing to say about the four hours in between when the car sat on a lift, finished with the oil change, waiting on a customer who had not yet been reached.
The dataset behind this report covers 747 dealership accounts, 16.5 million repair orders, 4.36 million unique customers, and $5.65 billion in service revenue across the 12 months ending February 2026.
747
dealership accounts
16.5M
repair orders analysed
$5.65B
service revenue covered
1. What silence actually looks like
Start with what the customer wants, because on this point the industry has unusually clear third-party data.
J.D. Power's 2026 U.S. Customer Service Index Study found that 64% of service customers want photo or video documentation alongside their multi-point inspection. Among mass-market brands, 26% get it. Among premium brands, 44%.
Photo or video with the inspection
Source: J.D. Power 2026 U.S. Customer Service Index Study.
So roughly two out of three customers are asking for something three out of four are not receiving. That is the whole report in one line, and it comes from outside our data.
What it looks like from inside the lane is messier and harder to put on a report.
An advisor calls, gets voicemail, tries again between customers, and by the time the phone is answered the bay has been idle four hours. Nobody logs any of this.
Or the estimate happens verbally. Brakes are getting thin, there's a coolant leak, probably around twelve hundred. No photo, no line items, no time to think it over. The customer declines, mostly on reflex. It was never that she couldn't afford $1,200. She couldn't see it.
None of this is a discipline problem. It is what happens when the people running live customer relationships are handed software designed to keep the books.
2. The calls that never became repair orders
Everything in the rest of this report concerns repair orders that exist. This section is about the ones that don't.
Marchex call analytics put unanswered inbound automotive service calls at 20 to 30% of total volume, clustered in the morning drop-off window when advisors are least able to pick up.
A missed call is a categorically different loss from a slow approval. A slow approval is revenue delayed and a bay held hostage. A missed call is a customer who wanted to give you money and could not find anyone to take it, and who leaves no record behind. It appears as nothing at all, which is precisely why it has gone unpriced for so long.
We can now put real numbers on it, from one store. Gary Moe Mazda in Lethbridge, Alberta deployed Kimoby Voice in mid-2026.
4 of 5
repair orders previously involved at least one missed call
240
missed calls a month now handled automatically
12 hrs
advisor time recovered monthly from callbacks and voicemail
"Before this, I was seriously looking at hiring someone just to handle our inbound calls. A few months in and I'm really glad we went with this instead."
Andrew Lusignan
Service Manager, Gary Moe Mazda Lethbridge
One store is one store. We are not going to extrapolate 240 calls a month across 747 rooftops and present the product as a finding. But the ratio underneath it is worth sitting with: four out of five repair orders touched by a missed call, at a store that had no idea until something started counting.
3. The velocity tax
Silence has a cost today, on the repair orders currently in your lane. Every hour of dead air is an hour a bay stays blocked and a ticket stays open.
What is the revenue difference between repair orders with and without a digital conversation?
+$159.67 per repair order
Average customer pay gap between repair orders with a digital conversation and those without, measured across 16.5 million ROs.
$452.79 with, against $293.12 without. A 54.5% difference across 3,767,659 conversation-linked repair orders. Bigger jobs naturally generate more conversation, so this is an observed pattern, not a causal claim.
How many repair orders actually get a digital conversation?
Each dot is one repair order in a hundred, at platform scale.
3,767,659 repair orders with a conversation against 12,742,630 without, over twelve months.
How fast do customers approve work when the estimate arrives digitally?
The median digital approval lands in six minutes. The phone-based average is 22 to 23 hours. Run it and watch the difference.
What is a photo actually worth on an inspection?
Approved and declined inspections are not the same size of job. Toggle between them.
$628.61
Average value of an inspection the customer approved.
A number recited over the phone sounds like an upsell. A photograph of a worn pad next to a new one, with a price attached, sounds like the truth.
What happens once a store starts sending video?
Digital inspection volume across the platform, roughly 13-fold growth over eight months. Only the two endpoints are measured, so the months between are not shown.
4. The compounding loss
The velocity tax is what you feel this week. The rest compounds quietly, and shows up as a trend line nobody can trace back to a cause.
Most dealerships treat a declined repair as a closed conversation. Stores running digital estimates can turn a decline into a trigger. At the 90th percentile it recovers $30,685 per rooftop per year in work that was originally turned down. There is no meaningful industry benchmark for declined-service recovery rate, and that absence is itself the finding: you cannot benchmark a number no system produces.
Where does retention actually land?
The eight-point spread between 65.8% and 73.9% is not a methodology quirk. It is the difference between a store that waits and a store that reaches out.
399,343 customers
who had been gone thirteen months or longer came back. By any standard definition, those were lost.
Roughly 534 reactivated per rooftop per year, or about $283,000 annually at an average repair order of $530 (CP+W).
+6 points
retention lift with a digital conversation on the RO
+9 to 10 points
retention lift among campaign recipients
+7 points
retention lift among customers given a loaner
Each measured separately, each across sample sizes above 20,000 customers. These are correlations and we will not dress them up as anything else. But three unrelated engagement types pointing the same direction, at that scale, is a pattern worth taking seriously.
5. The benchmark
What follows is observed revenue at real stores at the 90th percentile, running the full workflow. It is not modeled and it is not a projection.
What is still on the table at your store?
The $1.7 million figure assumes a store doing none of this. Tick what you already run and the remainder is your actual gap.
We already do this
Still on the table, per rooftop per year
$1,722,738
Nothing ticked yet. This is the full 90th-percentile opportunity.
Where does your store sit?
Median stores extract $322.91 per repair order in customer pay. Ninetieth-percentile stores extract $560.72. Same software. Put your own numbers in.
Annual value of closing to the 90th percentile
$1,545,180
$29,715
per week
$5,943
per business day
$237.72
per repair order
At $323.00 per RO you are at the platform median.
The scale marks the two percentiles we actually measured. Intermediate percentiles are not in this dataset, so the space between the markers is not a distribution curve.
What does "not silent" measure out to?
| Metric | Top-performing stores | Industry default |
|---|---|---|
| Proactive outbound messages per RO | 1.3 to 1.8 | effectively 0 |
| Customer reply rate | 35% of outbound | not measurable |
| Median estimate approval time | 6 minutes | 22 to 23 hours (phone) |
| Campaigns per store per year | About 27 | sporadic or manual |
| Digital payment share | 82.5% mobile | close to 0% |
The right column is not a benchmark. It is an absence. Most dealerships cannot produce a figure for proactive digital touchpoints per repair order because nothing in their stack generates one.
Three questions to ask your own store
1. What is your average customer pay on repair orders with a digital conversation, versus without?
2. What is your median time from estimate sent to customer approval?
3. How many customers who had lapsed past a year did you bring back this year through outreach?
Answer the three above
If the honest answer to all three is that you do not know, that is what silence sounds like from the inside. Across 747 dealerships, it prices out at up to $1.7 million a year.
6. Why this is structural
The instinct is to fix this with people. Train the advisors harder. Hire someone for the phones. Those are patches, and the data suggests patches are not enough, because the problem sits underneath the people.
The DMS was never built for this. It records every dollar, part number, labor hour and warranty claim precisely. What it does not know is what the advisor told the customer, when the estimate went out, whether the customer saw a single photograph, or whether anyone circled back on the work they declined. That is not a defect. It was built for accounting, not for a live conversation moving at the speed of a service drive.
Point solutions do not close the gap either. A texting tool fixes messaging and leaves the estimate alone. An inspection tool fixes visibility and stops short of approval. Each one adds a login and a tab, until the advisor is running five systems and the customer experience falls through the seams between them.
The slow clock
The DMS
Precise, historical, organized around what already happened. A system of record.
The fast clock
The service lane
Chaotic, human, organized around what happens next. Most dealerships run it on nothing at all.
For twenty years dealerships have tried to run the fast clock on the slow clock's gears. There is a well-established name for what the slow clock does. There is not yet a common name for what the fast clock needs.
Definition
A Dealership Engagement System (DES)™ is a single platform that runs the entire service lane customer interaction, from drop-off through inspection, estimate, approval, payment and follow-up, connected to the DMS but distinct from it. The system of record tells you what happened. A Dealership Engagement System tells you what to do next.
Not a texting tool bolted on, not a DMS module, not a chatbot.
7. What 747 dealerships demonstrate
The data comes from Kimoby's Service Lane OS, across 747 dealership accounts in North America, 672 in Canada and 75 in the United States. We are the vendor. That is stated plainly rather than buried, and the limitations are set out below.
29 million
messages a year, 1.8 million outbound monthly
154,003
appointments booked from outbound campaigns
$50.5 million
campaign-attributed service revenue
Median stores extract $322.91 per repair order in customer pay. Ninetieth-percentile stores extract $560.72. Identical software. The gap is entirely execution, which means it is available to anyone willing to work the process.
Adoption follows a consistent shape across several hundred implementations: messages start flowing in week one, advisors trust the system over their personal phones inside a month, revenue velocity becomes measurable around month three, and retention patterns emerge by month six.
Closing
No dealer principal sits down and decides to leave customers in the dark.
It happens by default, through a DMS built for a different job, personal cell phones filling the gaps, and verbal handoffs that depend on somebody remembering. The result is indistinguishable from choosing it.
Six minutes against twenty-three hours. That is the whole gap, repeated across every repair order in the lane.
Frequently asked questions
What is the cost of silence in a dealership service department?
Across 747 dealerships and 16.5 million repair orders, the revenue attributable to closing communication gaps in the service lane runs to roughly $1.7 million per rooftop per year at the 90th percentile. The largest single components are upselling with video inspections ($640,878), additional repair orders driven by campaigns ($404,630), and upselling with photo inspections ($192,178).
How long does it take a customer to approve additional service work?
When the estimate arrives digitally with photos and line items, the median time to approval is 6 minutes, with 88.2% approved within an hour. Phone-based approvals average 22 to 23 hours by comparison.
Do digital inspections and estimates increase repair order value?
Repair orders with a digital customer conversation averaged $452.79 in customer pay versus $293.12 without one, a difference of $159.67 per RO across 3.77 million conversation-linked repair orders. This is an observed correlation rather than a controlled experiment: larger jobs naturally generate more communication.
What percentage of dealership service customers want photo or video inspections?
64% of service customers want photo or video documentation alongside their multi-point inspection, according to J.D. Power's 2026 U.S. Customer Service Index Study. Only 26% of mass-market customers and 44% of premium customers actually receive it.
What is a Dealership Engagement System?
A Dealership Engagement System (DES) is a single platform that runs the entire service lane customer interaction, from drop-off through inspection, estimate, approval, payment and follow-up, connected to the DMS but distinct from it. The DMS is a system of record for what already happened. A Dealership Engagement System manages what happens next.
How many lapsed service customers can a dealership realistically win back?
Across the 747 dealerships in this dataset, 399,343 customers who had been absent 13 months or longer returned through proactive outreach over twelve months. That works out to roughly 534 reactivated customers per rooftop per year, or approximately $283,000 in annual revenue per store at an average repair order of $530.
What is a good service retention rate for a dealership?
NADA targets 72% year-over-year cohort retention. Across the 747 dealerships in this dataset, retention measured 65.8% on a strict cohort basis and 73.9% when lapsed-customer reactivation is included. For industry context, Cox Automotive's 2025 study found retention among owners of vehicles two years old or newer fell from 72% in 2023 to 54% in 2025.
Methodology and limitations
Platform data was drawn from the Kimoby Service Lane OS analytics platform for the twelve months ending February 2026. Repair order values reflect customer pay unless noted as CP+W. Retention uses a NADA-comparable cohort method: unique customers in Period A (March 2024 to February 2025) who returned in Period B (March 2025 to February 2026).
On causation
The revenue velocity findings represent observed patterns, not controlled experiments. Higher-value repair orders plausibly generate more communication on their own. Job complexity, vehicle age, brand mix and geography are all uncontrolled confounders. We present the pattern at scale, name the confounders, and leave the causal question open.
On the 90th percentile
The $1.7 million figure reflects top-decile performance on a fully deployed system. Median performance is materially lower. Results vary by store size, brand mix, market and adoption depth.
On intermediate percentiles
This dataset contains the median and the 90th percentile. It does not contain the 10th, 25th or 75th. The position scale in Section 5 marks only the two measured points, and the space between them should not be read as a distribution curve.
On the source
This data comes from one vendor's platform, which is both the reason it exists at scale and a limitation on how it should be read. Kimoby customers are a self-selected group: dealerships that chose to invest in service lane engagement are unlikely to be representative of dealerships generally. The absolute numbers should be read as what is achievable by stores already committed to this, not as an industry average.
On the phone
Voice data in Section 2 comes from a single named dealership rather than platform aggregate. Platform-wide voice figures are being collected and will appear in a future edition.
Industry benchmarks cited
NADA, Cox Automotive's 2025 Service Industry Study, J.D. Power's 2024 and 2026 U.S. Customer Service Index studies, J.D. Power's 2024 U.S. Aftermarket Service Index Study, and Marchex call analytics.
© 2026 Kimoby Inc. All rights reserved. Dealership Engagement System (DES)™ is a trademark of Kimoby Inc.
— Per business day
— Per repair order
—
