How many service calls does your store miss? A 30-minute audit
Last updated October 18, 2026
Written by the DealersThink team. Published October 18, 2026.
You find missed service calls in the phone system you already have, counted by hour, for a normal week. What they are worth is a repair-order figure you choose from your own DMS. This guide is that audit. It does not publish DealersThink’s answer rate, a national miss rate, or a dollar value for a missed call.
Why the audit uses your numbers
Vendor pages like a single percentage. A single percentage cannot see that your shop is closed on Sunday, that lunch is one advisor, or that Saturday morning is a different business from Tuesday at two. The only miss rate that should change a staffing plan is the one in your call reports. DealersThink will not print an aggregate of our stores here. A 16-rooftop group runs the product. Their results are not a public statistic, and neither is a blended “industry” number we did not compute from a named source. If you want a worksheet file to download, we have not published one. The steps fit on a pad.
Pull the calls from the phone system
Set a timer for half an hour. Open the reporting tool your phone vendor already gives you. Choose seven consecutive days that were ordinary: not a holiday weekend, not the week the main number was forwarded by mistake, unless that broken week is the one you are trying to explain. Export or copy, by hour, the calls that were offered to the service line and the calls that were answered. If your system splits abandoned, voicemail, and overflow, keep the split. If it only gives you “answered” and “not answered,” use that and do not invent a third bucket.
Write down the hours the drive is actually staffed. Include lunch if the drive is theoretically open and practically one person. Include Saturday if you are open Saturday and the BDC is not. The holes are usually obvious once they are in a column. You do not need us to circle them.
Answer rate by hour
For each hour, answer rate is answered calls divided by offered calls, if your report defines “offered” that way. Use your vendor’s definition and write it at the top of the page so nobody “corrects” it later with a different one. Rank the hours. The bottom of the list is the audit. It is often the open, the close, lunch, and the day you are short. It is sometimes a hunt group that looks staffed and is not. The point of doing it by hour is that a fine weekly average hides a bad hour, and the bad hour is when the guest calls.
The math, with your repair-order value
Pick a repair-order value from your own DMS. Customer-pay, a recent month, the average you would defend in a meeting. If you will not defend a number, leave the dollar column blank and stop at call counts. Do not borrow a figure from a blog, including this one.
Unanswered calls in the hours you care about, multiplied by the share of those calls you believe were real service opportunities, multiplied by your repair-order value, is a ceiling, not a forecast. The share is a judgment. Some unanswered calls are vendors, wrong numbers, and people who called back and got through. Say so on the sheet. A ceiling you labeled as a ceiling is allowed to inform a decision. A ceiling you relabel as “revenue we lost” is how a meeting goes sideways. DealersThink does not supply the share or the repair-order value. Both boxes are yours.
What to fix, in order
Fix the hour, not the slogan. If the misses are after the last coordinator leaves, the options are paying someone to stay, accepting the misses, hiring an answering service that will take a message, or putting an agent on the line that can book. Riley is that last option on our side: 24/7, into Xtime when the menu allows, and a handoff or a Leads to recover item when it does not. If the misses are at lunch while the store is open, an agent and a clearer hunt group are both plausible, and the phone report will not tell you which culture problem you have. If the misses are “we answered, and nobody booked,” the problem is not coverage. It is the appointment path. An agent that only takes a better message will not fix it. An agent that writes Xtime might.
Do not buy from the ceiling alone. A demo should use the hours you just wrote down. Ask what happens to a call in the worst hour of your sheet. If the answer is a national statistic, you are in the wrong meeting. Book a demo and bring the sheet. We will talk about those hours, and we will not replace them with ours.
Book a demo.
See Riley on the service line and Casey on after-hours sales. Contact us on the form.
FAQ
How do I find out how many service calls we miss?
Pull the answer-rate report from the phone system you already use, by hour, for a recent week, and count the calls that rang and were not answered. The guide on missed service calls walks through that audit with your own repair-order value. DealersThink does not publish a national miss rate.
Does it work after hours, on weekends, and on holidays?
Riley answers service calls 24/7, including nights and weekends, and when the store is closed. Casey answers after-hours sales calls and sales calls when the sales desk is already on another call. The store’s own desk takes the calls that need a person during the hours the store staffs it.
What happens when Riley cannot book a request, such as the wrong op code, a recall, or a diagnostic?
Riley books the services the store’s Xtime menu can accept. A recall, a diagnostic, or an op code the scheduler will not take is not told to the caller as a booked appointment. Riley hands the call to a person on the BDC desk, or takes a number so a coordinator can call back and confirm.
What does it cost?
Pricing depends on rooftops and products. Book a demo. This page does not list a price.