A shopper calls your dealership on a Saturday afternoon. Nobody picks up. They hang up and call the dealership down the street. You just lost a lead you paid good money to generate.
It happens more than most dealers want to admit. Phones ring at the wrong times, go to the wrong desk, or get answered by someone who can’t help. Call forwarding is what stops that from happening — and it’s a lot simpler to set up than most people think.
What Call Forwarding Does for a Dealership
Call forwarding routes incoming calls wherever they need to go, automatically. You can set rules based on time of day, day of week, call volume, or whether a line is busy. If your sales floor is slammed, calls roll to a different rep. If it’s after hours, calls forward to whoever is on call.
It sounds basic, but the impact is significant. You eliminate the dead ends that cost you leads — the unanswered phones, the voicemail boxes that never get checked, the calls that land on a desk where nobody can actually help.
Common Scenarios Where It Makes a Difference
- A customer calls the main line during lunch when the receptionist steps away — forward automatically to a sales rep’s cell
- A service customer calls on Sunday morning — forward to a service advisor’s mobile instead of ringing an empty building
- Your finance office is in a closing meeting — forward finance calls to voicemail with a custom greeting that sets expectations
- It’s a holiday and the lot is closed — forward to your highest-volume salesperson who offered to take calls
The After-Hours Problem
Dealerships are busy places, but they don’t run 24/7. A huge chunk of car shopping happens outside business hours — people browse on their phones at night, then call when curiosity peaks. If that call hits a dead end, you’ve lost a warm lead.
With 800.com’s call forwarding, you can set up an after-hours routing plan that sends calls to a mobile number, plays a personalized message, or routes to a voicemail that actually gets checked. You decide what happens — and you can change it any time.
Department-Level Routing
A well-run dealership has multiple departments that operate differently: sales, service, finance, parts. Each one should have its own routing logic. Service calls at 7am should go somewhere different than a sales call at 3pm.
You can configure forwarding rules for each department independently. That means a customer calling about their car in service gets routed right to a service advisor, not bounced around the building or told to hold while someone tracks down the right person.
Staff Flexibility Without Chaos
Dealerships have turnover. Schedules change. Salespeople go on vacation. When those things happen, call forwarding rules can be updated instantly — no IT involvement, no waiting for a phone company to make changes on the back end.
That kind of flexibility keeps your phones running smoothly even when your team is in flux. You don’t want your phone system to require a support ticket every time someone’s schedule changes.
The Calls You Don’t Miss Are the Sales You Don’t Lose
Every missed call is a potential customer who went somewhere else. In a high-competition market like automotive, that adds up fast. Most dealerships aren’t losing business because of bad cars or bad prices — they’re losing it because they’re hard to reach.
Getting your call routing right is one of the easiest wins you can make. It costs almost nothing compared to your ad spend, and the payoff is immediate.
What to Do Before Setting Up Forwarding
Before you configure call forwarding, it helps to walk through your current call flow. Map out where calls are going today: who answers the main line, what happens if they don’t pick up, how service calls get handled differently from sales calls. Identify the gaps. Those are the scenarios your forwarding rules need to solve.
Most dealerships find two or three critical gaps in the first five minutes of this exercise — missed calls during shift changes, calls going to a wrong department, after-hours calls with no answer. Once you know the gaps, building the forwarding rules around them is straightforward.
Related: See how 800.com helps automotive dealerships stay connected
