Lexus, Mini Lead 2022 J.D. Power Customer Service Index Study

One of the less-exciting aspects of vehicle ownership is getting your car serviced. It’s usually more expensive than you’d like, not to mention time-consuming. Unsurprisingly, people have a lot of opinions about getting their vehicle serviced, and of course, J.D. Power wants to hear them. That’s why the organization has been running the Customer Service Index Study for the last 42 years, and this year’s results were announced Wednesday.

The J.D. Power CSI Study is based on survey responses from over 67,000 owners and lessees of vehicles from 2019 through 2021. The 2022 study was conducted from July 2021 through December 2021, and the results aren’t necessarily all that surprising.

According to US customers, the most critical aspects of the dealership service process are, in order: service quality, service advisor, vehicle pick-up, service facility and service initiation. The automakers best meeting the needs of their customers in these categories are Lexus for luxury brands and Mini for mass-market brands. The latter is probably good since its cars don’t typically fare super well in J.D. Power’s other reliability-oriented studies.

The biggest takeaways from the study are that people still inherently trust their dealers for service. Most respondents said they’d be fine with the dealer handling complex repair work on their vehicle, rather than going to a third-party body shop. Also, as dealers become more tech-savvy by sending texts to customers and photos or videos of repair work, customer satisfaction increases. This is also true for dealers who pick up customer cars for service and mobile service departments like we see with Tesla.

Lastly, while we’re seeing electric cars needing less overall maintenance work due to the dramatic reduction in moving parts, EV service has its own unique needs. Right now, dealers aren’t meeting customers’ expectations. Whether that’s because fewer technicians are qualified to work on BEVs or parts availability is worse than average, leading to longer wait times, there is still a lot of room for improvement, according to the study.