Ford Dealers Rank Above Average For Telephone Effectiveness

July 2, 2024 9:52 am

A front three quarters view of the Ford Bronco Sport.

Ford dealers have historically ranked basically all over the place in a variety of surveys conducted over the past few years, with most of those studies revolving around customer service levels. However, an analytics company called Pied Piper also conducts a host of studies measuring customer satisfaction with things like responsiveness to Internet leads coming through dealership websites, and in that regard, Ford dealers ranked near the bottom of the pack in 2022 before bouncing back somewhat in 2023. Now, that same agency has released data pertaining to a dealer’s telephone effectiveness, too.

The Pied Piper 2024 PSI Service Telephone Effectiveness (STE) Study measures the efficiency and quality of service telephone calls from a customer’s perspective, with an eye toward how quick and easy it was for those customers to set up a service appointment with their local dealer. For those year’s STE Study, Pied Piper called 2,716 dealerships, after which it assigned a score between 0 and 100 based on a variety of measurements, including how quickly a service appointment is scheduled and how helpful representatives are. This year, Ford dealers performed quite well, with the brand ranking ninth among all brands with a score of 59.

“Well-run service departments focus on increasing customer loyalty, and the first service experience to drive that loyalty is a customer’s phone call to schedule an appointment,” said Fran O’Hagan, Pied Piper CEO. “Vehicle customers who find scheduling service difficult vote with their feet by moving to another dealership or independent shop, or even getting rid of their problem vehicle.”

This is certainly good news for Ford dealers in general, as those entities haven’t performed well at all in the past two installments of J.D. Power’s U.S. Customer Service Index (CSI) Study. In fact, Blue Oval dealers ranked below the mass market segment average in that study in both 2023 and 2024.

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By Brett Foote

Brett's lost track of all the Fords he's owned over the years and how much he's spent modifying them, but his current money pits include an S550 Mustang and 13th gen F-150.