Existing customers checking on a vehicle already in the shop make up most of a service department's phone volume, but the calls rarely get treated as their own category worth fixing.
Ask a service manager what share of the drive's calls are new customers booking a first appointment, and what share are existing customers asking about a car already sitting in a bay, and most will guess wrong in the same direction. They assume the phone is mostly new business. It isn't.
In CDK Global's 2025 Service Shopper study, 61 percent of callers who reached a service department by phone were existing customers, not new ones (CDK Global). Phone still books 58 percent of service appointments, so that existing-customer share isn't a footnote. It's most of the volume, and a meaningful piece of it is someone calling back about a repair order that's already open, not starting a new one.
That tracks with what shows up in customer satisfaction research. "I had to keep calling the service department to find out about my car" has shown up as one of the most common service complaints in manufacturer and dealer-association surveys for years (Auto Dealer Today). The complaint isn't that the news was bad. It's that getting the news took more than one call.
A new-appointment call has a clear job: find an open slot, confirm it, hang up. A status call has no clean end point. The advisor has to stop, pull up the repair order, figure out where the vehicle actually is in the process, and translate technician shorthand into something a customer wants to hear, often while a second customer is standing at the desk and a technician is waiting on a decision about a parts delay.
Hold times reflect that friction. Average hold time for dealership service calls climbed to 9.3 minutes in 2025, up from 8.2 minutes the year before, and dealership service NPS fell from +59 to +47 over the same stretch (CDK Global). None of that is one bad advisor having a bad day. It's the arithmetic of a department where every call, new or repeat, competes for the same two or three sets of hands, and the repeat calls are the ones with no scheduling shortcut to speed them up.
A status call needs three things to resolve without pulling anyone off the drive: confirm which vehicle and repair order the caller means, look up where that order stands, and either give a real answer or take a message with enough context that the callback doesn't start from scratch. None of that takes judgment. It takes access to the repair order and a system that recognizes the caller on the way in.
That's the specific gap Uobo-Connect's service call handling is built to close. It recognizes a returning customer and an open repair order, confirms the vehicle is in process, and either answers directly or queues a callback with the full context attached, so the advisor who follows up isn't starting from a blank slip of paper (see the service call agent page for how status checks fit alongside appointment booking and recall handling). The advisor still makes every call that requires judgment, a delay explanation, a price conversation, a diagnosis update. What disappears is the interruption for calls where the honest answer was always going to be "let me check and call you back."
A few questions worth asking before assuming status calls are already handled well:
If the answer to any of those is "we don't know," the problem isn't call volume. It's that the calls costing the most advisor time have never been separated from the ones that are easy to schedule around.
More content from the same collection, rendered on the same article system.
A study of 1,215 dealership sales calls found reps ask about a customer's trade-in only 14 percent of the time, even though doing so nearly doubles the appointment-set rate.
Nine in ten sales calls that reach a live person ask if one specific vehicle is still available, and most dealerships still can't answer it the same way twice.
What AI phone coverage actually does for dealership sales and service calls, where calls go missing today, and how to evaluate a vendor against your own store's numbers.
