Definition
Answer rate is the share of inbound phone calls a dealership answers live, out of all the calls it receives. Stores usually track it by department and by hour, because a missed call is often a missed sale or service appointment. The term is also used for outbound calls that customers pick up.
Pasch Group Dealer Glossary
What it means for a dealership
Inbound answer rate is a simple ratio: calls answered live divided by calls received. The useful detail is in the breakdown by department, hour and day of week. Also look at what happened to the missed calls: voicemail, ringing out or hanging up on hold. Service lines are often the weak spot, because advisors answer phones while they also help customers in the drive.
Missed calls are expensive because many of them come from paid advertising. In Pasch Group’s Google SEM report, 67% of Google Ads hard conversions were phone calls in Dealer eProcess data. A call from an ad that rings out is ad spend with nothing to show for it. Overflow routing, a BDC and AI voice assistants are the usual fixes.
Outbound answer rate is the other side: the share of calls to customers that get picked up. Many people ignore numbers they don’t recognize, so dealers use branded caller ID and watch their outbound numbers for spam labels.
In practice
A store’s call reports show its service line misses many calls between noon and 2 p.m., when advisors take lunch and the drive is busy. It sends overflow calls in that window to the BDC and an AI assistant, then checks the answer rate again a month later.
Questions
How do I calculate my dealership’s answer rate?
Divide the calls answered live by the total inbound calls in the same period, then multiply by 100. Pull the numbers from your phone system or call tracking platform and split them by department and hour so you can see where calls are being missed.
Updated October 11, 2026