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Wards Auto
Online vs. Phone: Who Wins in Service Appointments?
October 2025
It should be easy, not annoying, for a customer to schedule a vehicle service appointment with a dealership.
But sometimes it’s a hassle, as evidenced by a Pied Piper Management Co. study. The consultancy measured how effectively dealerships by brand handled service appointment requests, both online and on the telephone.
Some dealerships did better than others. The ones with problems risk losing customer confidence and loyalty.
“All a service customer wants, whether online or on the phone, is someone or some technology to interact with them,” Pied Piper CEO Fran O’Hagan tells WardsAuto. “They don’t want to be put on hold for five minutes.”
If they are, they may start to wonder: If scheduling a service appointment becomes an issue, what hassles are ahead in the actual servicing of the vehicle?
The most common issues that muck up appointment-making include being placed on hold indefinitely, getting stuck in a phone tree/AI loop and going to voicemail when transferred.
Pied Piper submitted 4,887 service requests to dealerships representing major automobile brands.
For the survey, dealerships receive service appointment website and telephone scores, each ranging from 0-100, based on their performance in measurements tied to best practices most likely to drive service revenue and customer loyalty. The website and telephone scores were combined into a single service scheduling effectiveness (SSE) score.
Mini dealerships scored No.1 in the combined scoring. The brand achieved an overall SSE score of 66, seven points higher than the industry average.
Following Mini in overall SSE score were Lexus, BMW, Mazda and Honda.
While Mini had the highest overall SSE score in the study, Porsche ranked highest in the website portion and Lexus achieved the highest telephone score.
Mini’s strength came from balanced performance across both website and telephone service scheduling – placing second in Service Website Effectiveness and third in Service Telephone Effectiveness.
By contrast, other brands ranked higher in one channel often performed worse in the others, resulting in lower combined scores, says Cameron O’Hagan, Pied Piper’s vice president of metrics and analytics.
