Centralize when your stores share a CRM, sell similar products and cannot each staff long hours alone. Keep the phones at the store when brand knowledge and the GM's ownership matter more than coverage. Most groups land on hub and spoke: one shared room for first response and long hours, a named person at each rooftop for the handoff.
Three Shapes a Group Phone Room Can Take
The argument gets framed as central against local. In practice there are three workable shapes.
| Shape | Who answers | Fits when | Watch for |
|---|---|---|---|
| Centralized | One room for all stores, one manager | Stores share a CRM and sell similar products; no store has the volume for long hours alone | Agents who do not know the store; GMs who call it "corporate's BDC" |
| Store-level | Each rooftop runs its own agents under its own managers | Stores are far apart, brands differ a lot, each store has steady volume | Thin coverage, no bench, six versions of the process |
| Hub and spoke | Central room takes first response and long hours; a named person at each store owns the handoff and store-specific questions | Most groups past two or three stores | Unclear ownership between the hub and the store contact |
The general case for and against running your own room at all is in outsourced versus in-house BDC. This page is only about where the room sits once you have more than one rooftop.
What Centralizing Buys
Coverage hours. This is the strongest argument. Take three stores with two agents each, as an example. Two people cannot cover a store from open to close six days a week once you count lunches, days off and a sick day, so each store has holes. Put the same six people in one room on staggered shifts and the room can stay staffed from early morning into the evening for all three stores. Same payroll, more covered hours. The method for sizing a room is in how many BDC agents a dealership needs.
Bench depth. When one of two agents quits, that store has lost half its phone room. When one of six quits, the room is short for a few weeks and nobody's leads go unworked.
One manager and one process. A real BDC manager is hard to justify for two agents. For six or ten it is an obvious hire, and that person can listen to calls, coach and run one follow-up cadence. Training gets done once.
Size alone does not deliver any of this. In Pied Piper's 2026 dealer-group version of its internet lead study, the average score across 31 large dealer groups was 74 out of 100, and group scores ranged from 54 to 93. The top-ranked group answered by email or text and also phoned within 30 minutes 91% of the time; the average group did it 50% of the time. That mystery shop says nothing about how each group is organized. It does say that being big is not the same as being consistent.
What Centralizing Costs
Store knowledge. A store agent knows that the used-car building is across the street, that the Saturday crew is short, and which salesperson is good with first-time buyers. A central agent working five stores knows what is in the CRM and on the website.
Brand differences. A luxury store and a high-volume import store do not sound alike on the phone, and their certified programs, incentives and EV questions differ. One talk track across all of them will be wrong for someone. Central rooms that work assign agents to a pod of similar stores.
GM ownership. This is the cost that kills central BDCs. Once the room belongs to the group, appointments become "their" appointments, salespeople stop greeting them properly, and each side blames the other in the monthly meeting. A central room needs every GM to own show and sold results for appointments set at that store. Our piece on aligning sales and BDC teams covers the handoff itself.
Settle the CRM Question First
Most central BDC projects stall on the software, not the people. Answer these before you move anyone:
- One CRM instance or several? An agent who has to log in and out of five systems, each with its own tasks, cannot work a blended queue. Either the group consolidates, or agents are assigned to stores by instance.
- Who owns a customer who is in two stores' databases? Decide the rule before two stores call the same person on the same day.
- How does a lead get routed? By the store the customer picked, by the vehicle's location, or by distance. Write it down.
- Can the phone system show the agent which store was dialed? The greeting has to match the store the customer called.
- Who has which login? Central agents need access to several stores' customer data, which is an information security decision as well as an operational one. The rules are covered in giving a BDC vendor CRM access.
How to Report by Rooftop
A central room that reports one blended set of numbers has made the group's biggest problem worse. The dealer groups page on this site makes the case that a group needs its stores measured the same way. Here is what that looks like for a central BDC.
- Stores are the columns. Calls offered, calls answered, leads received, contacts, appointments set, shown and sold, each by rooftop, with a group total at the end.
- One set of definitions. A contact is a two-way conversation at every store. An appointment has a date and a time at every store. Use the definitions on our dealership BDC benchmarks page or write your own, but use one.
- Tracking numbers by rooftop. It is the only way to know which store a phone call belonged to.
- Set and shown credited to the same store. If the room sets an appointment for store A and the customer buys at store B, decide in advance who gets the credit.
- Cost allocated by workload. Split the room's cost by each store's share of leads and calls handled, not evenly. An even split makes the small store subsidize the big one.
- Split the room's work from the store's work. Contact and set rates belong to the room. Show and sold rates are shared with the store. Put both on the page so neither side can hide.
To see what the current setup costs and how many of the week's 168 hours it covers at each store, run each rooftop through the BDC cost calculator.
Where an Outside BDC Fits a Group
Most dealer groups are not large. NADA's annual profile of franchised dealerships reports that 90.5% of dealership owners operate one to five stores. A group of three or four rooftops often cannot fill a central room deep enough to cover nights and weekends, which is where an outside team earns its place.
An after-hours layer across every store. The stores or the hub keep the daytime work. One outside team takes calls and leads for all rooftops when everyone has gone home. What that gap looks like is in what happens to leads after hours and on weekends.
A one-rooftop pilot. Pick the store with the weakest coverage, hand one defined scope to an outside team, and compare it with its own prior numbers and with a sister store. The steps are in how to pilot an outsourced BDC for 90 days.
Overflow for the hub, and new stores. A central room has peaks too. Pinnacle's outsourced call center for dealerships names overflow support, after-hours coverage and a hybrid of in-house core hours with outside support among the ways it works, and lists new store launches among the situations it scales for. Pinnacle works with dealers from large groups to independent stores. We sell this service, so weigh our view accordingly.
A Short Test Before You Move Anyone's Desk
Do the stores share a CRM, or will they within the year? Are the stores similar enough that one agent could work any of them after a week? Will every GM sign up to own show and sold results for centrally set appointments? Is there a manager who can run the room, and whom the GMs respect? Can you report by rooftop from day one?
Five yeses point to a central room. Yes on the CRM but no on store similarity points to hub and spoke with pods. A no on GM ownership means the project will fail whatever the org chart says, so fix that first. The rest of the Dealership BDC Guide covers the models, costs and contract questions that come next.
Frequently Asked Questions
How many stores do you need before a centralized BDC makes sense?
There is no store count that settles it. The question is whether the combined workload fills enough seats to cover long hours with a bench, and whether the stores are similar enough to share agents. Two high-volume neighbors can justify it. Six small stores in six markets may not.
Should a centralized BDC handle service calls for every store?
Only if agents can book into each store's service scheduler under that shop's capacity rules. Service scheduling depends on local detail: technician hours, loaners, shuttle runs. Many groups centralize sales lead response first and leave service booking at the store, or add it one store at a time.
Who should a centralized BDC manager report to?
To someone above the stores, such as a group operations or variable operations director, with a standing weekly review with each GM. Reporting to one store's GM makes the room that store's BDC in practice.
Can stores with different brands share one BDC?
Yes, with pods. Group similar stores and assign agents to a pod so they learn those brands' products, programs and tone. A fully pooled queue across very different brands tends to produce generic calls, because no agent can hold every store's detail.
How do you split the cost of a centralized BDC between stores?
By workload: each store's share of the leads and calls the room handled that month. Avoid an even split, which overcharges the smallest store. Review the split each quarter, because a store that adds a brand or a lead source changes its share of the work.
Summary
A central BDC buys a dealer group coverage hours, bench depth and one process, and it costs store knowledge and, if handled badly, the GMs' ownership of the result. Hub and spoke keeps most of the gain and a named contact at each store. Settle the CRM setup before the org chart, report every number by rooftop with one set of definitions, and use an outside team where a group is thinnest: after hours across all stores, or as a pilot at one.
