Call handling best practices for multi-site garage groups

Five sites, five phones

A regional manager opens Monday's report. Site A answered 91 percent of calls. Site D answered 63 percent. Site B has a greeting recorded by a receptionist who left last year. A customer who called site C to ask whether her car at site E was ready was told to call site E. Nobody knows how many calls went to voicemail on Saturday, because voicemail does not report.

Groups grow faster than their phone handling. Every acquisition brings its own line, its own habits and its own gaps. The practices below come from what works when a group decides to run the phone as one operation.

Why it matters more for groups

Consolidation is the trend on both sides of the Atlantic. In US collision repair, Focus Advisors counted at least 4,019 locations under the five largest operators by mid-2025, about 13.3 percent of shops and 31.7 percent of revenue. Cox Automotive counts nearly 299,000 auto mechanic businesses in the US, up 12 percent since 2018. In Europe, the FIGIEFA and Roland Berger Panorama counts around 250,000 independent workshops and outlets, and chains keep adding sites.

Marchex, which analyzes calls for large multi-location automotive service operators, reports missed or failed call rates of up to 21 percent, with the best locations still near 10 percent. In a group, the gap between the best and worst site is the opportunity. And the phone is still the channel: 64 percent of service customers in a 2025 CDK Global survey booked by phone.

Twelve practices

1. Measure the same six numbers at every site. Speed of answer, abandonment rate, booking accuracy, calls per advisor, after-hours volume and bay utilization. Weekly, per site, per hour of day. You cannot standardize what you do not compare.
2. One standard, local detail. The greeting, the escalation rules and the tone are the group's. Opening hours, technicians, stock and loaner cars are the site's. Keep both in one configuration so a change to the standard reaches every site at once.
3. Route by intent and by site, not by which number was dialed. A caller who reaches site C about a car at site E should get the answer, read from site E's planner.
4. Pool the overflow. When one site's counter is busy, the call should be answered somewhere, by a shared desk or a voice agent, rather than ringing out. A voice agent that reads every site's planner can answer fifty calls at once, and the difference between site A and site D disappears.
5. Never voicemail. After hours, a call should be answered and booked. Voicemail is where callers go to leave you.
6. Write the breakdown rules down and version them. Who is on duty at each site, what counts as urgent, what the driver is told. Every decision should carry the rule version that produced it.
7. Transfer warm, with a summary. A person picks up knowing the plate, the job and what the caller already said.
8. Cut inbound with outbound. Car-ready calls and texts the moment a job closes remove the most common inbound call at every site.
9. Review sampled calls weekly, centrally. One person reads flagged calls across all sites and corrects the rule once. A supervising review that scores calls on accuracy and tone makes this a half-hour job.
10. One customer record. A customer who uses two sites is one customer. Bookings, calls and summaries should land in one place, whatever the local planner is.
11. Language per site. English, Dutch, German or Spanish where the customers are, under the same rules.
12. Roll out per site, with a shadow week. Run the new handling on real calls without acting, compare it with what the site did, then switch on. Keep a pause button per site.

What a group dashboard should show

• Answer rate and speed of answer, per site and per hour
• Bookings made and bay hours recovered, per site
• Breakdowns routed and time to reach a person
• Hand-offs and their reasons
• Sampled-call quality scores
• After-hours calls and what happened to them

One group's experience

Broekema, a two-location garage group in the north of the Netherlands, had two lines, two greetings and two sets of gaps. After 5 PM and on Saturdays, calls went to a voicemail that only took messages. It forwarded both numbers to Nekaf on a Tuesday and went live on Thursday, with one standard for both sites, bookings into the right bay and breakdowns routed to the mechanic on duty with a summary. The planner integration followed later without interrupting the phones.

That order matters for groups: one standard first, integrations second, site by site.

Questions to ask a vendor

• Can you show the same dashboard per site and for the group?
• Can a rule change go live for all sites at once, with a version number?
• Can I pause one site without touching the others?
• Where is the data held, and can it stay in the EU for my European sites?
• What happens to a call if your service is down?