Study: Long wait times for car service
Customer satisfaction falls for 1st time since ’95
Customer service satisfaction among car owners failed to improve year-over-year for the first time in nearly 30 years, according to a new report from J.D. Power.
The analytics company’s annual U.S. Customer Service Index Study saw a dip in overall customer service satisfaction this year as drivers face longer wait times for maintenance or repair work. It’s the first time the score has fallen since 1995.
While the satisfaction rating decline was modest – down just two points to 846 on a 1,000-point scale – the report had been inching up five to 10 points in recent years, according to Chris Sutton, vice president of automotive retail at J.D. Power.
“The customer experience certainly isn’t getting better,” Sutton said. “It’s just taking customers longer to get a service appointment, something that we saw starting to increase significantly last year.”
The study measures service satisfaction for maintenance or repair work at franchised dealers or aftermarket service facilities. This year’s study was based on responses from more than 64,000 owners and lessees of 2020 to 2022 model-year vehicles surveyed between August and December 2022.
Wait times for car service are up
The number of days premium car owners wait for an appointment was 5.6 days compared to 3.7 days in 2021, when the trend started. For mass-market vehicles, wait times grew from 3.5 days to 4.8 days.
The report pointed to a shortage of technicians available to fix cars. The microchip shortage has also hurt vehicle availability and made retailers less likely to want to loan cars to drivers, another catalyst for longer wait times.
“That’s a longer-term fix around staffing, around technicians. That doesn’t give me a lot of short-term hope that that’s going to be getting better,” Sutton said.
Electric car service satisfaction
Customer service satisfaction among battery electric vehicle owners is 42 points lower than traditional internal combustion engine vehicle owners, according to the report. Sutton said the “significant” difference is driven by a lack of EV knowledge among service advisers, who tend to have less experience with electric cars.
EVs also have a recall rate more than double that of traditional internal combustion vehicles.
EVs require service 1.8 times per year on average, 23% of which is for recalls. Drivers with cars that rely on gas and diesel go in for service 2.3 times per year on average with 10% of those trips prompted by recalls.
“There is the promise that EVs would eventually have much less service than a typical (internal combustion engine) vehicle. And to this point, we don’t really see that,” Sutton said.