Jonathan FriedmanReplyResearch Checks The Evidence
We spend a lot of our time looking into how organisations handle inbound communication.
Whether it’s a bank, a utility provider, or a local council, the pattern is often remarkably similar.
Their system is designed to look responsive, but the actual experience for the person on the other end is actually usually very different.
Car dealerships have invested heavily in chatbots and automated acknowledgements, crafting an initially impressive veneer of efficiency
Recently, we came across a striking claim from a software vendor operating in the UK car dealership market.
A blog post from Torque DMS contained a statistic that demanded our attention.
In their 2026 report, Torque stated:
“78% of automotive leads receive their first response after 30 minutes.
And 32% receive no response at all.”
We don’t know the exact methodology behind that specific number.
It might just be an internal estimate, or drawn from a limited sample of their user base. But plenty of direct and confirmed evidence of the wider car dealership landscape turns out exactly this kind of proportion entirely plausible.
The Gap Between Perception and Reality
When we started cross-referencing this claim with the wider body of UK research, we found something that genuinely surprised us.
Sure, that seemingly staggering number might indeed just turn out to be be an internal estimate, but on closer inspection it turns out to look as if it is definitely in the right ballpark. The wider data suggests the problem is real and the sheer scale is looking way too big to ignore.
In July 2026, Moneypenny published research highlighting a significant perception gap in the automotive sector. Their study found a stark difference between how dealers view their own service and how customers experience it:
“84% of automotive businesses believed they provided a good email experience, compared with only 66% of consumers.”
That 18-point gap is telling because it suggests dealers are often unaware of the silence on the other end of the line. They tick a box and assume the job is done.
This perception gap is reinforced by the speed at which buyers are willing to walk away. In October 2025, MOTORS published a study showing that buyers have very little patience (reported in Cazoo) for slow replies:
“35% of buyers will look elsewhere if dealers are slow to respond to their enquiries.”
The Problem With the Fast Reply
Even when the reply does arrive, the Torque statistic only tells half the story. The industry is obsessed with speed, measuring success by how many minutes it takes to send an auto-responder.
In our previous ReplyResearch report from 2026, we already explored how dealers often reply with generic templates.
We found that these responses consistently fail to answer the buyer’s specific questions
If a buyer asks about service history, a reply saying “call us” is functionally useless. This is the same pattern we see in financial services and property. A customer asks a detailed question and gets an automated response.
If 32% of leads are getting no reply at all, and a large portion of the remaining 68% are getting empty replies, the actual useful response rate is catastrophically low. The speed metric is masking a quality crisis.
The Psychology of the Ignored Enquiry
So why does this happen?
We believe it is a feature of the system, not a bug. Dealers are inundated with low-quality leads, so they prioritise the ones that look easiest to close.
As we saw in a recent LinkedIn thread from a car industry veteran in February 2026, dealers often ignore detailed enquiries.
Andrew Williams documented his own experience trying to buy a car:
“Main dealer group responses? Zero.
Specialist used dealers responses? Zero
Private sellers responses? 100%.”
One dealer in that thread admitted that an email lead asking specific questions would be put on a to do list rather than urgent. Another suggested that asking for details on tyres screams difficult customer.
The Institutional Incentive to Stay Silent
We also have to consider the uncomfortable possibility that some of this unresponsiveness is deliberate.
In a high-pressure sales environment, time is a finite resource for the salesperson.
If a lead looks like it will take hours of back-and-forth to close, it is easier to let that lead go cold.
That silence isn’t an accident!
it’s a cold calculated decision to avoid a low-probability sale.
This is where the data from Torque DMS becomes particularly troubling.
If 32% of leads are being ignored, it suggests (erm, just suggests?) that an absolutely huge portion of the market is systematically choosing not to engage.
This has serious implications for anyone interested in unresponsiveness. It means that simply telling organisations to reply faster is not enough. You have to change the incentives that encourage them to ignore difficult questions.
The Wider Unresponsiveness Remit
This is why ReplyResearch looks beyond just the car dealership market.
The mechanics of an ignored enquiry are (surely?) universal, whether you’re buying a car, opening a bank account, or dealing with a letting agent.
The institutional instinct is always to prioritise the easy win, isn’t it?
The buyer with complex needs is the one that’s the biggest threat to the smooth running of the system.
Aren’t they the ‘friction’ that the dealer’s software UX was supposedly designed to totally eliminate?
But what if those ‘difficult customers’ turn out to be (and often are) the most valuable ones?
They’re just doing their due diligence, aren’t they?
They’re definitely ready to spend money, just providing they get a straight answer to a straight (or even not so straight) question.
When an industry decides that answering those questions is simply too much effort, it isn’t just an ‘operational failure’.
It’s much more than that: it’s actually a total breakdown of trust.
That buyer just learned that the organisation can’t be relied upon.
The Verdict
The 32% figure from Torque DMS may not be a fully confirmed reflection of the entire UK market. (tell us more Torque!)
But the wider evidence does nothing to suggest it isn’t entirely plausible.
The car dealership industry has a deep-seated problem with uncontactability
Sure, this is not just a car dealer issue. It is a fundamental failure of modern customer service.
Until organisations start measuring the quality of their responses, rather than just the speed, the silence will continue.
But the solution is not more automation or faster workflows.
It is a return to the fundamental principle of customer service.
Just answer the question that they just asked
If an organisation can’t do that, they shouldn’t be surprised when the customer just walks away
The evidence is there, and that 32% figure is looking like nothing more or less than a warning that this particular industry can’t afford to ignore.
Sources below
Sources section
Sources for Do Only Two Out Of Three Car Dealer Enquiries Ever Get A Response?
1 Torque DMS
Source name in full: Dealer KPIs: What to Actually Measure in Your Vehicle Sales and Service Business. Publication date displayed: 07/02/2026.
https://www.torquedms.com/posts/dealer-kpis-what-to-measure-vehicle-sales-service
Where this source appears in the article: Opening discussion before “The Gap Between Perception and Reality”; “The Problem With the Fast Reply”; “The Institutional Incentive to Stay Silent”; and “The Verdict”. It supplies the 78% delayed-response and 32% no-response claims.
Relevant passages: “78 percent of automotive leads receive their first response after 30 minutes. And 32 percent receive no response at all.”
Where to find them: Under “The speed problem most dealers do not know they have”, in the paragraph beginning “The industry performance data makes the gap concrete”.
2 Moneypenny research reported by Automotive Management
https://www.am-online.com/news/dealers-and-customers-divided-on-service-quality
Where this source appears in the article: “The Gap Between Perception and Reality”, in the paragraph attributing July 2026 research to Moneypenny and the following 84% versus 66% comparison.
Relevant passages: The reproduced results table lists email experience ratings of 66% among consumers and 84% among automotive businesses, an 18 percentage point gap. The accompanying account describes responses from 200 automotive businesses and 5,000 UK consumers.
Where to find them: The table headed “Biggest customer service perception gaps”, row “Email”, in the accessible reproduction below. Survey scope appears in its opening paragraphs.
https://industry-news.biz/dealers-overestimate-customer-service-moneypenny-survey-finds
3 MOTORS Consumer Insight Panel reported by Cazoo
Source name in full: MOTORS, Dealers that fail to respond to car buyers within six hours, risk losing business to competitors. Published on the Cazoo dealer website, 24 October 2025.
Where this source appears in the article: “The Gap Between Perception and Reality”, in the paragraph introducing the October 2025 MOTORS study and the following 35% statement.
Relevant passages: The release reports a survey of 2,000 car-buying decision makers. It says 35% would contact other showrooms or search online after unanswered calls or slow message replies; 67% expected email, SMS or WhatsApp replies within six hours.
Where to find them: Opening three body paragraphs, beginning “Dealers who fail”, “The research, which polled” and “Furthermore, over a third”.
4 ReplyResearch
Where this source appears in the article: “The Problem With the Fast Reply”, in the reference to a previous ReplyResearch report and the assertion that generic templates consistently fail to answer buyers’ questions.
Relevant passages: “An automatic message confirms receipt. That proves an acknowledgement was sent. It does not establish whether someone subsequently answered the question.”
Where to find them: Under “Acknowledged is not answered”, opening paragraph. Also see “The harder question gets less help”, which summarises a US Pied Piper study comparing responses to ordinary and more complicated enquiries.
5 Andrew Williams on LinkedIn
Source name in full: Andrew Williams, LinkedIn post beginning “I really do despair about some automotive businesses”, with reader comments.
Where this source appears in the article: “The Psychology of the Ignored Enquiry”, including Williams’s account of dealer and private-seller responses and the subsequent discussion of commenters’ attitudes to detailed enquiries.
Relevant passages: “Main dealer group responses – zero Specialist used dealers responses – zero Private sellers responses – 100%”. Danny Bond’s comment describes lower urgency for a sourcing enquiry made by email. George Heron’s comment suggests detailed questions may make a buyer appear harder to satisfy.
Where to find them: Williams’s main post, paragraph immediately after his description of emailing dealers; comments by “Danny Bond DB Automotive” and “George Heron”. Use the commenter names to locate them; LinkedIn may change their order or require sign-in.
This Footnote Zone uses NokNok’s diagnostic toolkit to examine how the responsiveness failures and inaccessible service journeys described in this article can be identified, measured, and addressed.
- Email Finder: Identifies the friction of user requests existing simultaneously in form databases without accountable human contact options, and scans an organization’s website and related public-facing materials for published email addresses, then reports on structural deficiencies, discrepancies, missing contact routes, or other contactability gaps.
- Reply Radar: Targets the failure of service teams to meet response deadlines and manage human queues, such as the dyslexic claimant whose promised contact never came for fourteen months, and deploys targeted test emails and quantitatively measures reply rates, latency, response consistency, and related responsiveness benchmarks.
- Compliance Sniffer: Addresses the unreliability of current automation agents, including grounding errors and failures to meet legal service outcome expectations, and analyzes incoming responses for objective quality, clarity, relevance, escalation, and compliance benchmarks.
- Mystery Shopper: Audits the complete service journey from first contact through response, adaptation, action, and recovery to prevent systemic end-to-end contact failures, and executes a comprehensive end-to-end responsiveness UX audit, testing how a real user experiences the organization’s contact, response, and escalation pathways.
Disclosure: The diagnostic tools referenced in this Footnote Zone were developed by NokNok, a specialist in online responsiveness tool design. ReplyResearch may use NokNok tools, resources, or analysis when preparing coverage, while retaining responsibility for its editorial decisions, including what topics to cover, what sources to cite, and how stories are presented. Read the full ReplyResearch Collaborative Disclosure Policy here.
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