What Is Average Speed of Answer at a Car Dealership?

Average speed of answer (ASA) is the average time between a call arriving and a live person picking up, measured in seconds. At a dealership, it is the number most closely tied to how many callers hang up before anyone answers.

Dealermate is an AI call facilitation platform for Canadian automotive dealerships. ASA rarely shows up next to answer rate on a phone system's main dashboard, but it is usually the better early warning sign, because it moves before a call is lost, not after.

How ASA Is Calculated

ASA is the total wait time across all answered calls, divided by the number of answered calls, over a set period. It is normally reported in seconds and calculated automatically by the phone system or BDC platform.

The detail that trips up most reporting is what counts as "wait." Some systems start the clock the moment a call reaches a ring group or extension; others start it at the first ring on the general line, before any IVR menu has even played. A store comparing its ASA to an outside benchmark should confirm which starting point its own system uses, since the two produce different numbers from the same call pattern.

There is also a statistical quirk worth knowing. ASA is usually calculated only on calls that were eventually answered. A caller who waits 90 seconds and then hangs up never enters the ASA calculation at all, they show up in abandonment rate instead. That means a store with heavy abandonment can post a deceptively low ASA, because its longest waits are the ones that left the sample.

What a Reasonable ASA Target Looks Like

General call center guidance puts a reasonable ASA somewhere in the range of fifteen to thirty seconds, with anything past a minute generally considered a sign of real understaffing rather than a routine queue. Dealership data specific to Canadian stores is thinner, so that range is best treated as a starting reference rather than a fixed benchmark, and read alongside abandonment rate rather than on its own.

What matters more than the store-wide average is the spread. A dealership can post a fine daily ASA and still lose a meaningful share of calls during a handful of predictable hours, because an average smooths over the worst moments of the day.

Why ASA Spikes at Predictable Times

ASA is not flat across a service day. It tracks the same concurrency ceiling that governs how many calls a store can physically answer at once.

During the morning write-up window, advisors are with customers at the drive and calls queue because nobody is free to pick up, not because the phone system is slow. The same pattern shows up over the lunch rotation, when staffing drops below normal levels while call volume from customers on their own lunch break stays roughly constant. Saturday mornings often produce the sharpest spike of the week, when showroom traffic, service volume, and phone demand all peak at the same time with a thinner weekend schedule covering all three.

A store that only checks its monthly or weekly ASA average will not see these windows. They need to be measured on their own.

Why ASA Predicts Abandonment Better Than Call Volume Alone

Caller patience is not evenly distributed across a hold period. Most callers who are going to hang up do it early, within the first thirty to sixty seconds, rather than waiting it out to a longer average.

A store doesn't lose a caller because the average wait crept up a few seconds. It loses them because a specific call, during a specific window, waited past the point that particular person was willing to hold.

This is why watching ASA by time of day is more useful than watching it as a single daily figure. A rising ASA during a known peak window is an early signal that abandonment is about to climb in that same window, before the abandonment numbers themselves show it. Reading the two together gives a more complete picture than either metric read in isolation, including alongside call answer rate, which only tells you whether a call eventually connected, not how long the caller sat waiting for it to happen.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is average speed of answer at a dealership? Average speed of answer (ASA) is the average number of seconds between a call arriving and a live person answering it. It measures wait time for calls that were eventually answered, not calls that were abandoned.

How is ASA calculated for a dealership? ASA is the total wait time across all answered calls divided by the number of answered calls, over a chosen period. Phone systems differ on whether the clock starts at the first ring or after an IVR menu, which affects how comparable the number is across stores.

What is a good average speed of answer for a dealership? General call center guidance treats fifteen to thirty seconds as a reasonable range, with waits past a minute usually signaling real understaffing. Dealership-specific benchmarks are limited, so this range is best used as a reference point alongside abandonment rate rather than a fixed target.

Does a low ASA mean a dealership has good phone coverage? Not on its own. Because ASA is only calculated on answered calls, a store with high abandonment can show an artificially low ASA, since its longest waits left the sample before being counted. It should be read together with abandonment rate and answer rate.

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