Impel SVP of Operations Britt DeJohn joins Sam D’Arc on Car Dealership Guy’s Daily Dealer Live.
Dealership service retention is sliding, and price isn’t the reason. In a recent segment of Daily Dealer Live, host Sam D’Arc sat down with Britt DeJohn, SVP of Operations at Impel, to unpack where dealer revenue is really leaking.
The obsession is familiar: speed to lead, response time, the front door. Meanwhile, the back door sits wide open. Dealers have poured five years into the showroom while the service drive quietly bleeds customers to the shop down the street.
Britt makes the case that the fix isn’t more hustle from an overstretched team. It’s playing offense. So instead of waiting for customers to raise their hand, the winning dealers reach every record in the DMS before the friction ever sends them elsewhere.
Watch the Full Conversation
3 Operational Insights You Can’t Ignore
1. The Unmined Gap Is Bleeding You Dry
Most of your service revenue is sitting in the DMS, completely unworked.
- The Old Way: A handful of BDC reps juggle sales leads and service opportunities, so the vast majority of service records never get a proactive touch.
- The New Way: Service AI identifies maintenance milestones, lapsed customers, and missed intervals, then engages each one with VIN-specific outreach and scheduling timed to their driving behavior.
- The Result: The gap between what your team could work and what it has time to work closes. That’s where the revenue was hiding all along.
2. Customers Aren’t Fleeing Price. They’re Fleeing Friction.
The reward for staying loyal shouldn’t be a long hold and a maze of a scheduler.
- The Old Way: A motivated customer calls in, waits on hold, leaves a voicemail, and hears nothing back for days — or fights through a multi-step online scheduler and gives up.
- The New Way: Every call gets answered and every customer gets a clear, personalized path to booking, so the friction that pushes people to independents disappears.
- The Result: Convenience stops being the independent shop’s advantage. Your newest customers stay yours.
3. AI as a Silent Workforce, Not a Replacement
The biggest barrier to AI in the service drive isn’t the tech. It’s the culture.
- The Old Way: A disconnected stack — scheduling here, reputation there, MPI somewhere else — none of it talking, all of it taxing your staff with tabs and manual handoffs.
- The New Way: One AI Operating System coordinates the tedious, redundant outreach at scale, while a new role Britt calls the AI quarterback trains, monitors, and coaches the agents like any great hire.
- The Result: Teams that feel empowered, not threatened, freed from the busywork to do what only people can — build the relationships that keep customers for life.
From the Conversation
On playing offense: Britt’s point is blunt. The dealers who win the next era stop waiting for customers to raise their hand and start proactively working every customer across the entire ownership lifecycle. It’s the difference between a generic blast and a message that reads like your best advisor wrote it.
On the complexity tax: Britt describes the invisible cost of running a dozen disconnected point solutions that don’t share context. It drains staff operationally and degrades the customer experience, because service doesn’t know what marketing sent and sales doesn’t know what service flagged. The customer feels every seam — and quietly defects.
On the seven-day gut check: Britt leaves dealers with one exercise. Pull a single number: how many customers are due for service in ninety days, and how many got proactive outreach. Most stores can answer the first half. Far fewer can answer the second. That gap is your unmined revenue, and you can’t fix what you’ve never measured.
Ready to Close Your Unmined Service Gap?
See how Impel’s AI Operating System turns your DMS into proactive, personalized outreach across every stage of the ownership lifecycle. → Book a Demo
About the Guests
Britt DeJohn is SVP of Operations at Impel. She spent a decade on the vendor side, leading the product organization before moving into operations. An operator at heart, she focuses on helping dealers scale high-touch service across the entire ownership lifecycle.
Sam D’Arc (host) hosts Car Dealership Guy’s Daily Dealer Live, a leading forum where dealers learn, connect, and stay ahead of what’s next in automotive.
| Why are dealerships losing service customers? | Dealerships are losing service customers to convenience, not price. Industry research shows dealer service market share declining, with the sharpest drop among late-model owners. Long hold times and multi-step schedulers push customers toward independents. Impel closes that gap by reaching customers before the friction does. |
| What is proactive service outreach? | Proactive service outreach means contacting a customer about their specific vehicle at exactly the right point in the ownership lifecycle, before they ever have to call in. Instead of a generic blast, it’s the personalized message a great advisor would send if they had time to reach every record in the DMS. Impel’s AI Operating System does it across thousands of records at once |
| Does AI improve dealership service retention? | Yes. In an Impel study spanning more than 50 dealerships, 100,000 customers, and 120,000 repair orders, dealers using AI for proactive outreach saw a 27% lift in completed repair orders per store each month, roughly 95 additional ROs. The only variable was whether AI worked the customer base proactively. |
| What is the “complexity tax” in a service department? | The complexity tax is the hidden cost of running a dozen disconnected point solutions that don’t share information. It drains staff through constant tab-switching and manual handoffs, and it degrades the customer experience with duplicate, uncoordinated messages. Impel removes it by unifying every touchpoint in one AI Operating System. |