Why Dutch garages are adopting AI voice agents for customer communication

It is a Tuesday in October. The first frost was on the news last night. At the counter of a garage in Brabant, one person checks in a car, hands back a set of keys and answers the phone. When the phone loses, the caller hears ringing, then voicemail, then nothing. Most of them wanted a tire change or an APK slot. Some of them call the next garage.

Dutch garages are adopting voice agents because this scene repeats every day, and because three things about the Dutch market make it worse than it looks.

An inspection calendar that fills the phone

The APK is the steady drumbeat of workshop demand. RDW, the Dutch vehicle authority, registered 8,192,003 APK inspections of passenger cars in 2025, a record, after passing 8 million for the first time in 2024. The rules explain why the number keeps rising. A petrol or electric car gets its first APK at four years, then every two years until it is eight, then every year. A diesel starts at three years and is inspected every year after that. CBS counted just over 9.4 million passenger cars on 1 January 2026, 1.8 percent more than a year earlier, and RDW says the fleet is getting older. More cars, older cars, more annual inspections, and every inspection generates calls: when can I bring it in, is it done, did it pass, what will the repair cost. None of them need a technician. All of them need an answer.

Two peaks a year on the same phone line

Tire season is the other rhythm. NH Nieuws reported in November 2023 that garages across North Holland were full for tire changes, with one Haarlem garage no longer taking new customers and others quoting waits of weeks. A BOVAG spokesperson told the broadcaster that schedules were overcrowded everywhere and advised drivers to book early. Omroep Gelderland described the same picture in December 2021, with a garage in Beek quoting three weeks for a swap. Drivers wait for snow on the news, then everyone calls at once, in the week the workshop can least afford to answer.

Fewer hands to pick up

The counter is not getting more people. UWV, the Dutch employment agency, counted 7,700 open vacancies in the automotive sector in the second quarter of 2026, against 127,600 employee jobs in March 2026. Automonteurs and receptionisten are both on its list of hardest-to-fill roles. Onderneming.nl, citing CBS, reported that more than half of entrepreneurs in the auto and motorcycle trade expected a staff shortage in the first quarter of 2026. BOVAG's dealer figures for 2025, reported by Autoblog in March 2026, add a second pressure: electric cars need less maintenance and bring in less from oil and other aftersales products, so every booked hour counts more than it did.

What the missed calls cost

Marchex, a call analytics company, found that up to 21 percent of automotive service calls at large multi-location operators go unanswered, dropped or mishandled, and that even the best locations average close to 10 percent. CDK Global surveyed more than 2,000 dealership service customers in 2025: four in ten ran into hold times, menus, transfers, call-backs or no answer at all. Customers whose call went unanswered gave a Net Promoter Score of 26.7, against an average of 59.

Our own measurement at Autobedrijf van Nuland in Volkel showed the same thing at a family garage: 30 percent of incoming calls unanswered at peak times and after 5 PM, and half of the callers who reached voicemail never called back.

What a voice agent does differently

A voice agent is not a menu. It answers on the first ring, in Dutch, and asks what the caller needs. Nekaf is trained on more than 10,000 automotive terms, part names and job types, so it knows that an APK with a small repair needs a different slot than a timing belt. It books into the garage's own planner, Autoflex, Autotaal, WinCar or another system, with the right duration and technician. It reads car-ready status, follows the breakdown rules the owner approved, transfers a warning-light call to the mechanic on duty with a summary, and answers fifty callers at once in tire-season week. English and German are available too.

The transparency rules of the EU AI Act are in effect from August 2026, according to the European Commission. Nekaf tells callers they are speaking with Nekaf, every call is logged with its transcript and the rule that decided it, and data for Dutch workshops stays in the EU.

What changed in Volkel

Autobedrijf van Nuland forwarded its existing number and was live in under two weeks. Over 8,420 incoming calls in May and June 2026, no call went unanswered. More than six in ten calls were completed without staff: opening hours, car-ready status and bookings. Bookings rose 23 percent, and the counter got back around 170 hours a month.

> "It knows the difference between an inspection booking and a car-ready question. Our counter finally has time for the customer standing in front of it."

Bas, owner, Autobedrijf van Nuland

How to start

Forward your number and approve the rules: bays, technicians, opening hours, job durations, breakdown rules. Most workshops are live within 48 hours and connect the planner when ready. If you want the numbers first, Ask Nekaf reads your planner and call log for 90 days at no cost and reports your speed of answer, abandonment rate and after-hours volume.