Harley-Davidson Owners Need Just Five Days to Get Their Bikes In for Repairs

But how long does this process take these days, from appointment call to a resolution of the problem? For us individuals, the answer to that is a matter of personal experience and luck. On average though things do not seem as bad as we expected.

We now know this thanks to the results of a survey published this week by Pied Piper, a company that likes to conduct all sorts of studies about the effectiveness of business and processes. This time, these California guys tried to find out which motorcycle and powersport company provides the fastest service appointments in all of America.

And the short answer is Harley-Davidson. According to the published paper, dealers of the Milwaukee-based motorcycle company are the fastest in picking up the phone and walking you through the hassle of getting a service appointment. They're also the fastest in getting you an open slot for the actual repair, with an average of five days or less needed for them to take the bike in and start fixing it.

The podium in this respect is completed by dealers of Kubota and John Deere, while at the opposite end of the spectrum, with about a 12-day waiting time between the call and the actual appointment, sit companies such as Ducati, CFMoto, and BMW.

The findings seem to be as solid as they get, because Pied Piper doesn't appear to have messed around. To get to these results, the company had its employees call no less than 1,608 dealerships of 26 of America's most important powersports brands (you can find the full list in the photo above) over a period of about two months, pretending they were customers in need of help.

The exact goal of the survey, called the 2023 PSI Service Telephone Effectiveness (STE) Study, was to measure "the efficiency and quality of service telephone calls from a customer's objective of quickly and easily setting up a service appointment." Harley-Davidson topped the rankings overall, followed by Polaris Off-Road, BMW, and Indian.

Given how after-sale services seem to factor in more and more with customers' buying decisions, it is refreshing to know what to expect once all the attention you get from dealerships as a prospective buyer ends.