Toyota & Acura Rank Highest Across Luxury and Mass Market Brands for Inbound Phone Experience Released by CallSource

WESTLAKE VILLAGE, CA: 5 Nov 2019: CallSource, the leader in automotive call tracking and analytics, released their first annual Inbound Phone Experience Study analyzing OEMs to determine how each brand’s inbound phone calls impact customer experience.

“For years, everyone has known there is a direct correlation between car shoppers’ dealership experience and their likelihood to purchase. The phone is a key element of customer satisfaction within a car buying journey. We wanted to use our data to find the right combination of behaviors that will have the quickest impact on customer experience for dealers and OEMs,” stated Pogo Parr, President of Automotive.

In this study, CallSource focused on three key areas of the inbound phone call: answer rate, connectivity score, and appointment set rate. CallSource identified these key areas as easy opportunities for dealers to immediately improve their customers’ phone experience. According to the study across all brands and categories, both luxury and mass-market, the average answer rate in dealerships is 95%, with only 83% of shoppers being connected to a live person in the correct department. The biggest dealership challenge is getting in-market shoppers to commit to a dealership visit, which only occurs 19% of the time.

“Awareness is key. By listening to and analyzing thousands of calls, it is obvious the phone process is broken in the dealership. With dealership visits declining as more shoppers research online, securing appointments to increase showroom visits is more important than ever. This study sheds light on the process of the phone that is broken within each brand and what OEMs and dealerships need to pay attention to, right now, to improve the overall consumer experience,” says Pogo Parr.

Other key findings from the study:

• - Toyota and VW rank highest in phone experience in mass-market brands.
  - Acura and Audi rank highest in phone experience for the luxury brands. Luxury brands, in general, have the lowest phone experience scores.

- Kia (90.3%) & GM (88.5%) have the highest connectivity scores in the mass-market while Acura (87.2%) and Audi (86.7%) rank highest in the luxury category.
- Toyota (27.9%) and Hyundai (24.5%) set the most sales appointments in the mass-market category while Acura (27.3%) and Alfa Romeo (25.2%) rank highest in the luxury category.

How Does Your Brand Rank?

For the full report and findings of this study, contact us at marketing@callsource.info or 888-340-0123.

About CallSource’s Phone Experience Study:

CallSource reviewed over 50,000 dealership phone calls across 23 brands between May and July 2019. The calls were scored by live analysts to determine the overall brands’ answer rate, connectivity score and the average number of hard-appointments set by in-market car shoppers.*

About CallSource

CallSource is fully committed to the quality and value of our data. As the inventor of call tracking and over 25 years’ experience, CallSource is the only company that has listened to and analyzed over a billion phone calls, and delivers targeted solutions for OEMs and dealers to improve customer experience and internal processes. We provide call tracking, call processing, coaching, and data analysis to the largest OEMs and industry providers in the automotive space.

* Hard-appointment defined as an appointment offered including specific time and date.