One of every 10 dealership customers who schedules a service appointment must wait to see a service adviser upon arrival, a new survey suggests. For half of these customers, the wait is brief; for the other half, the delay is 10 minutes or more.
Last month, DealerRater polled for Fixed Ops Journal nearly 15,000 customers who had visited a new-vehicle dealership recently. Among those who had made a service appointment, 90 percent said they saw the adviser on schedule.
Another 5 percent said they had to wait as long as 10 minutes, and the rest said they were kept waiting more than 10 minutes. There were no significant differences between luxury and mass-market dealerships in how promptly their service departments kept scheduled customer appointments, according to the survey.
In a separate survey, Cox Automotive's 2018 Service Industry Study, one of service customers' most frequent complaints was that they had to wait in line even though they had appointments. Such delays could cause some customers not to return to the dealership for service, the study suggested.
In response, some dealerships are designating "facilitators" whose job is to ensure that no service customer is kept waiting.
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