One in six callers could not get a service date, a study of 6,538 requests found

Sixteen percent of phone callers could not book a service appointment, which Pied Piper’s 2026 scheduling study rounds to one in six. The consultancy submitted 6,538 service requests across 33 automotive brands and four independent service chains, scoring each brand from 0 to 100 on how easily a customer can get a date and time. Volkswagen finished first at 73; Alfa Romeo finished last at 45.

The one-in-six figure describes calls, and the distinction carries weight. Pied Piper did not split the 6,538 requests between phone and website in its release, so the share cannot be restated as one in six of every request, and the requesters were the firm’s own shoppers rather than vehicle owners. The study measures how a dealership’s front door behaves.

Sixteen percent of calls and more than 40 measurements

Pied Piper’s September 14 press release states that 16% of callers industrywide were unable to schedule an appointment by phone. Each brand’s Service Scheduling Effectiveness score blends more than 40 weighted measurements covering both telephone and website experiences. Roughly two-thirds of service customers still prefer to book by phone, according to the release, so the telephone results shape the picture of the whole industry even as online scheduling grows.

CBT News reported the same figure with a sharper edge: more than 25% of callers failed to book at five brands. Obstacles ranged from long holds and phone trees to voicemail systems that never connected a caller with a person. The industry average score rose 7 points from 2025 to 66, so the typical brand is better than a year ago while still stranding a sixth of its callers.

Volkswagen at 73, Alfa Romeo at 45

Auto Remarketing’s account of the results has Volvo second at 71 and Acura, BMW, Mazda and Nissan tied at 70. Volkswagen’s strength was the phone, where it scored 69 and booked appointments 91% of the time, according to Wards Auto. Volvo led on websites with 79 and, per the dealership trade newsletter Car Dealership Guy, booked every online request it received.

At the bottom, Alfa Romeo scored 45, Ram 52, Dodge 55, Genesis 58 and Lincoln 59, the figures Autoblog carried when it reposted the study on October 5. The scale is Pied Piper’s own scheduling index. A brand’s number says how easy its dealers made it to get a slot, and carries no information about repair quality, price or customer satisfaction after the car is on the lift.

Spread is the other thing the 100-point scale exposes. The 28 points between Volkswagen and Alfa Romeo is larger than the 7-point gain the whole industry made in a year, so the experience of booking a service visit depends far more on which badge is on the car than on any industry-wide trend. A caller to a Ram or Dodge store, scored 52 and 55, faces a measurably harder time than one dialing a Volvo or Acura location, and each brand score is an average across its dealers.

Websites, AI hand-offs and the independents

Website scheduling failure rates varied from under 1% to 31% depending on the brand, with broken calendars, errors and overly rigid information requirements the common causes. Cameron O’Hagan, Pied Piper’s vice president of metrics and analytics, said top brands and dealers “remove friction” and that when a dealership makes the process difficult, customers “have plenty of alternatives.”

Website results diverged from phone results brand by brand. Volvo’s website score of 79 sits eight points above its overall 71, with phone requests the weaker channel, while Volkswagen’s 69 on the phone sits below its overall 73 because its site and app, the myVW app among them, carried the rest. Pied Piper reports that website scheduling showed the largest improvement of any channel this round, a 12-point gain, which is where most of the industry’s 7-point average rise came from. A brand strong on one channel and weak on the other still lands mid-table, which is why neither number alone predicts how a given customer’s attempt will go.

Those alternatives are visible in the data. The four independent chains in the study, Midas, Pep Boys, Firestone and Meineke, connected callers with an advisor in 38 seconds against 66 seconds at dealerships, and their earliest offered appointments averaged 1.3 days out against 2.9 days at dealers, according to the Car Dealership Guy summary. Pied Piper chief executive Fran O’Hagan frames the stakes as financial: he is quoted saying 70% to 80% of dealer profits come from fixing cars, and that dealers on average lose half of their new-car customers within two years. CBT News likewise puts fixed operations at 70% to 80% of dealership operating profit.

The study also logged where automated phone systems hand callers to people: transfers from AI to a human failed roughly one time in three, typically about 90 seconds into the call. Pied Piper has not published how many of the 6,538 requests involved such a transfer, so the share of failed bookings attributable to hand-offs remains unmeasured in the public material.

This article was produced with the assistance of AI and reviewed by Morning Overview editors prior to publication.

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