Napleton Auto Group Achieves Record Score in 2025 Dealer Group Study Measuring Response to Website Customers

Business Wire

05-05-2025

MONTEREY, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Napleton Automotive Group dealerships ranked highest in the 2025 Pied Piper PSI ® Internet Lead Effectiveness ® (ILE ®) Auto Dealer Group Study, which measured responsiveness to internet sales leads coming through dealership websites. Following Napleton were Ciocca Automotive, Herb Chambers Auto Group, and Berkshire Hathaway Automotive.
'Modern customers visit dealership websites first, and today's sales success is driven by how the dealerships respond.'
Pied Piper submitted customer inquiries through 2,105 automobile dealership websites representing 26 of the largest USA auto dealer groups. Each inquiry asked a specific question about a vehicle in inventory and included a new customer name, email address, and local telephone number. Pied Piper then evaluated the speed and quality of dealership responses sent by email, telephone, text, and chat over the next 24 hours. Each group's overall ILE Score is a combined average of their individual dealership ILE performances. ILE evaluations consist of over 20 differently weighted measurements, based on best practices that are mathematically most likely to generate sales, combining into an overall ILE score ranging from 0 to 100.
Napleton Achieved Highest Score on Record, What Behaviors Drove This Accomplishment?
2025 marks the fourth year in a row that Napleton Automotive Group achieved the top score in the annual ILE Auto Dealer Group study. Napleton improved their average score by four points for 2025, reaching an average ILE score of 91, the highest average ILE score on record and becoming the first brand or group to achieve an average ILE score in the 90s.
Reliably Answering Customer Questions Fast: In this year's study, 90% of Napleton customers received an answer to their question by email/text within one hour; a five-point improvement over last year and 30 points higher than the 2025 dealer group industry average.
Large Increase in Use of Texting to Answer Questions: Napleton in the 2025 study answered website customer inquiries by text 73% of the time on average, a large 19-point increase over their performance last year that significantly outpaced the overall industry's 3-point improvement in texting behaviors in 2025.
Quicker Average Phone Response: 96% of Napleton website customers in the 2025 study received a phone call within 24 hours, with 3 out of 4 receiving a call within 15 minutes.
'Did Both Fast' for More Inquiries: Answering an inquiry by email/text and also phoning, all within one hour, greatly improves the odds of reaching customers. Emails can land in spam/junk and be missed, customers often ignore calls from an unknown number and don't listen to voicemail, and even texts can be lost or ignored among the large volume of messages many people receive per day. Napleton 'Did Both Fast' 82% of the time on average, three points higher than last year and 42 points higher than the total dealer group average.
How Did the Industry Perform Over the Past Year?
Average dealer group performance increased only slightly – up one point - over last year, but performance has improved substantially over the past three years. Nine groups achieved average ILE scores over 70 in 2025, while three years ago in 2022 only two groups achieved ILE scores over 70.
Despite the improvement, there remains a large 50-point spread in ILE score performance in the 2025 study, with nine dealer groups improving their ILE score over the past year and seven groups declining in overall score.
Dealer Groups that Improved:
Nine of the 26 dealer groups studied in 2025 improved their ILE scores over the past year, on average increasing by 5 points, with two groups improving by 10 points. The most notable improved behaviors of these nine dealer groups were more appointments offered, more questions answered by texting, and answering questions faster on average than last year.
Offered More Appointments: Dealer groups that improved in 2025 attempted to set an appointment 7% more often than in 2024 on average.
More Effective Use of Texting: Texts sent by dealer groups with higher scores in 2025 were on average 6% more likely to answer a customer's online inquiry.
Answered Questions Quicker: On average, dealer groups that improved over the past year had a 9% increase in the rate of answering internet customer questions within 1 hour.
Dealer Groups that Declined:
Seven of the 26 dealer groups in the 2025 study had lower ILE scores than the previous year, with an average decrease of -4 points and two groups declining -8 or more points. Dealer groups that scored lower in 2025 were less likely, compared to 2024, to 'do both fast,' less likely to respond by phone, and less likely to use texting to answer questions.
'Did Both Fast' Less Frequently: Inquiries sent to the dealer groups in decline this year were on average 5% less likely to receive a 'did both fast' response, where both their question is answered, and they receive a phone call within the first hour.
Responded by Phone Less Often: Dealer groups in decline on average were 5% less likely in 2025 to respond to an online inquiry by phone, with the rates of three dealer groups declining by more than 10%.
Reduced Use of Texting: Dealer groups that declined in 2025 were on average 12% less likely to send a text, and their texts answered the customers question 6% less often than last year.
Comparing Top Dealer Groups to the Overall Auto Industry Using the '80/40' Rule:
Compared to the overall auto industry, top performing dealer groups tend to be much quicker and more effective at responding to online customers. In this year's ILE studies, 73% of the dealerships from the top five highest scoring dealer groups scored above 80 (providing quick and thorough personal responses), compared to only 40% of the dealerships for the auto industry overall. Similarly, only 6% of the dealerships from the top five dealer groups scored under 40 (failing to personally respond to website customers), compared to 19% of the dealerships throughout the total auto industry.
'Identifying a brand or group's dealerships scoring under 40 and over 80 is an efficient way to determine where improvement efforts should be focused,' said Cameron O'Hagan, Pied Piper's Vice President of Metrics and Analytics. 'Historically, we have found that dealerships that improve their ILE performance from scoring under 40 to scoring over 80 on average sell 50% more units from the same quantity of website customer leads.'
2025 Dealer Group Performance Compared:
Response to customer web inquiries in the 2025 study had large variations by group, as shown by these examples:
'Answered Question' - How often did the group's dealerships email or text an answer to a website customer's question?
More than 90% of the time on average: Ciocca Automotive, Herb Chambers Auto Group, Napleton Automotive Group
Less than 60% of the time on average: Ed Morse Automotive Group, Bergstrom Automotive
'Phoned Customer' - How often did the group's dealerships respond by phone to a website customer's inquiry?
More than 90% of the time on average: Napleton Automotive Group, Ciocca Automotive, Holman Automotive
Less than 45% of the time on average: West Herr Automotive Group, Greenway Automotive, Premier Automotive, Bergstrom Automotive
'Offered an Appointment' - How often did the group's dealerships offer to set an appointment for specific date/time?
More than 50% of the time on average: Napleton Automotive Group, AutoNation, Berkshire Hathaway Automotive, West Herr Automotive Group
Less than 20% of the time on average: Serra Automotive, Premier Automotive, Asbury Automotive Group, Greenway Automotive, Bergstrom Automotive
'Did Both' - How often did the group's dealerships email or text an answer to a website customer's question and also phone the customer?
More than 80% of the time on average: Napleton Automotive Group, Ciocca Automotive, Herb Chambers Auto Group
Less than 30% of the time on average: Greenway Automotive, Premier Automotive, Bergstrom Automotive
Why Was This Study Conducted?
'Modern customers visit dealership websites first, and today's sales success is driven by how the dealerships respond,' said O'Hagan. 'The difficulty is that the website customer experiences are often invisible or distorted by traditional dashboards, which makes this portion of dealership performance easy to overlook.'
For more than 15 years, Pied Piper has independently published annual industry studies that rank the omnichannel performance of brands and dealer groups. These studies track how industry performance changes over time and let clients understand how their own performance compares.
Pied Piper clients order ongoing Prospect Satisfaction Index ® (PSI ®) measurement and reporting – internet, telephone or in-person – for their dealerships, as tools to improve and maintain omnichannel sales and service effectiveness. Pied Piper clients have found that the key to driving dealership improvement is showing what sales and service customers are really experiencing – which is often a surprise.
About Pied Piper Management Company, LLC
Monterey, California - based Pied Piper helps brands and national retailer groups improve the omnichannel sales & service performance of their retailers.
Pied Piper's PSI process applies data science analytics to determine the omnichannel sales and service best practices most likely to drive unit sales and loyalty. PSI then uses a combination of artificial intelligence, machine learning and human actors to measure and report how effectively retail locations follow those best practices.
Examples of other recent Pied Piper PSI studies include the 2025 Internet Lead Effectiveness ® (ILE ®) Auto Industry Study (Subaru was ranked first), the 2024 Service Telephone Effectiveness ® (STE®) Auto Industry Study (Honda's Acura brand was ranked first), and the 2024 Telephone Lead Effectiveness ™ (TLE ™) Pontoon Boat Industry Study (BRP's Sea-Doo brand ranked first).
For more information about Prospect Satisfaction Index ® study results or to apply ongoing PSI measurement and reporting to improve performance, go to www.piedpiperpsi.com.