What Missed Calls Cost a Dealership

What was the keynote about?

At DMSC 2026, Cassie Broemmer, Chief Revenue Officer at Car Wars, took the main stage with “Marked as Spam: The Hidden Revenue Impact of Missed Call Connections.” Her case: dealerships spend heavily to make the phone ring, but customers are wary of unknown numbers, and with spam labeling, call screening and falling answer rates, getting someone to pick up is no longer a given.

Here is what sits behind that, from public data by Car Wars and others.

What is a call connection rate?

The share of callers who actually reach a person at the dealership. In Car Wars data for the first half of 2026, dealerships connected 56% of sales callers and 59% of service callers, while the top stores reached 71% and 78%. The gap between those numbers is shoppers you already paid to reach.

Why do dealership calls show up as “Spam Likely”?

Carriers use STIR/SHAKEN caller ID authentication to support blocking and labeling, and they also run their own call analytics, so even a fully attested call can be labeled spam. That matters because people screen: in Hiya’s 2026 consumer survey, 86% of calls from unidentified numbers went unanswered.

Ask your phone and CRM providers what attestation level your outbound numbers get, and whether those numbers are monitored for labels.

What happens when a sales call goes unanswered?

Most of those shoppers are gone. In Car Wars data for the first half of 2026, 64% of sales callers who couldn’t reach anyone never called back, and only 46% of missed calls got a follow-up.

AI doesn’t close the gap on its own. Pied Piper’s 2026 study found that when an AI responder handed an inquiry to staff, the shopper was twice as likely to get no personal reply. Pasch Group’s missed call calculator puts a dollar figure on your own numbers.

What can a dealership do this week?

1. Pull last week’s call report by hour and department, compare your connect rate with the 56% sales and 59% service averages, and fix coverage from 10 a.m. to noon.
2. Have your BDC call cell phones on each major carrier from the CRM dialer and write down what the screen shows: your name, a bare number or a spam warning.
3. Text STOP to your store’s texting number from a test phone and check that every system, including outside marketing vendors, stops messaging it within 10 business days.

Customer communication is one of the eight topics every DMSC program covers. See the topic page for the questions dealers are asking, and the 2027 sessions as they confirm.