As a car dealership, or even another type of automotive service provider, you’re juggling everything from handling customer inquiries to managing service appointments, all while trying to make sales and retain customers. But what if there was a way to enhance your customer service and sales without overloading your team? By outsourcing your car dealership call center services, you can streamline operations, improve lead management, and provide 5-star support, all without extra overheads.
This guide to outsourcing for car dealerships and automotive businesses will show you how to transform your car sales appointment setting and other service department customer support lines. From ensuring timely follow-ups to maintaining exceptional customer service, you can both reduce costs and boost efficiency.
What exactly is a car dealership call center?
A car dealership call center is a specialized team, department or service that handles inbound and outbound communications for automotive businesses. This may include calls relating to vehicle sales, service bookings, or general inquiries about the business’s offerings.
As well as phone support, many car dealership call centers can also handle email, live chat, and even SMS communications, ensuring customers can reach the business on their preferred platform. By outsourcing these tasks, dealerships can maintain excellent customer service while freeing up internal teams to focus on sealing deals and servicing.
Top Benefits of Outsourcing Automotive Call Center Services
1. More efficient appointment setting.
Whether you run a car dealership or a mechanical workshop, being able to efficiently set appointments is very important. When a potential customer calls or submit an online enquiry, a delayed response can cost you the sale or service. By outsourcing automotive call centre services to a dedicated team, you can ensure every lead is followed up quickly, even on weekends or overnight if you have the demand.
Appointment setters and customer service support specialists are trained to qualify leads, manage calendars, and schedule test drives, sales consultations, car repairs or servicing, all without interrupting your in-house team’s workflows, and systems. They can also handle cancellations, reschedules, and reminders, helping reduce no-shows, and improve conversion rates, improving your bottom line.
2. Improved service department capacity without hiring internally.
One of the most common bottlenecks in service departments is phone traffic, whether that’s customers calling to book, reschedule or check on service appointments. When your in-house team is stretched thin, it often means longer wait times, missed calls, and frustrated customers. So, outsourcing your customer support can instantly boost your capacity and manage customer enquiries without needing to expand your internal team.
Skilled support workers can handle appointment bookings, confirm service details, send reminders, and even follow up after servicing or repairs to ensure satisfaction. This frees up your service advisors and technicians to focus on higher ticket jobs, reducing admin overload and streamlining your customer experience. Plus, it can help you scale without the higher costs of hiring, training and on-going management.
3. Enhanced customer satisfaction and retention.
It goes without saying that customer loyalty is important for repeat business, with consistent, high-quality service essential for long-term retention. Every missed call, long hold time or poorly handled enquiry chips away at that trust, over time adding up potentially a lot of lost business. Outsourcing car sales appointment setting or service department customer support ensures your customers always speak to someone knowledgeable, polite, and focused on solving their problems quickly — meaning a good experience every time.
With trained agents handling everything from car sales appointment setting to service enquiries to appointment reminders, your customers receive the smooth, professional experience they expect. Plus, there’s no more bouncing between departments, or waiting on busy front-desk staff as there’s always a dedicated staff member to help. So, less lost business (and money) for your business.
4. Reduced operational costs.
Hiring, training, and even on-going performance management is expensive, especially if your team juggles multiple areas, like sales and service calls. Salaries, superannuation, office space, equipment, and ongoing HR management also add up quickly. Outsourcing to a specialized automotive call centre service helps significantly reduce these overheads while maintaining, and often improving, service quality for your customers.
Flexible outsourcing models mean you get the support you need with all your staffing costs bundled into one. Take our car sales appointment setting, and automotive customer support services at Offshore MVP. Our service includes all of your costs, so you don’t have to worry about IT or HR support, payroll, training, equipment or anything else as it’s all taken care of under your singular service cost. You’re not only saving up to 70% on staffing, but time in managing team members too.
5. Expanded after-hours coverage.
The online world means people are often doing their research on buying cars, or finding someone to service or repair their car late at night or on weekends. This is likely after your team is tucked up in bed, unable to answer their call or answer their message, which may sit unanswered until Monday or longer, if there are public holidays. This is where outsourcing your car dealership call centre, and online support comes in.
If you have the demand, you can offer extended or even 24/7 customer support without adding pressure to your internal team. Whether it’s a customer wanting to book a service after-hours through your live chat or a hot lead looking to arrange a test drive first thing the next morning, outsourced agents ensure every call is answered, and every opportunity is captured, whenever it comes in.
6. Improved lead follow-up.
The majority of dealership leads aren’t lost because they weren’t interested, but because no one followed up fast enough. Whether it’s a customer submitting an online enquiry or calling after hours to ask about a vehicle, time is everything. With outsourced car dealership call centre support, you get a dedicated team focused solely on lead response and nurturing.
These trained gents not only follow up quickly and professionally, often within minutes, but keep perspectives engaged, guiding them through the decision-making process. From answering initial questions to setting up test drives (or bookings), even managing your teams’ calendar availability, they handle the entire process. No more adding stress to your already busy in-house team who can now better focus on showroom walk-ins or paperwork (which you can also outsource to save them more time).
7. Centralised customer care for multi-location businesses.
Managing customer calls across multiple dealerships or service locations can quickly become chaotic, especially if each branch handles enquiries differently. This inconsistency not only frustrates customers, but can make performance hard to track. Outsourcing to a professional car dealership call centre or workshop customer support service gives you a single, centralised team that manages all inbound and outbound communication across your network to solve all your problems.
You can have two locations or twenty, all utilising the same customer support team for a unified, professional, high-quality experience every time, regardless which branch is being contacted. Calls are answered promptly, bookings are made accurately for better efficiency and reduced errors. The team can even better manage schedules, funneling work to branches that are less busy when others are in demand, if nearby.
How Offshore MVP Helps Dealerships Build Reliable Car Sales Appointment Setting & Customer Support Teams
At Offshore MVP, we work with car dealerships and automotive businesses to enhance and streamline their customer support teams with easy, cost-effective, and high-quality all-inclusive outsourcing solutions. As well as receiving dedicated team members who work only for you, we manage all of the recruitment, training, onboarding, IT support, HR management, and more, saving you more time and money. All of our team members are highly skilled and trained, and worked exclusively with your business.
Request a consultation today to see how your car dealership can benefit from outsourcing customer support.
