Your customer does not want to call you
The any news? phone call is not engagement. It is a symptom that your customer has no other way to find out what is happening to their deal.
Count the inbound calls your finance office takes in a week that consist entirely of a customer asking whether there is any news.
Every one of those calls is a customer who is anxious, has no way to check, and has decided that phoning is less uncomfortable than continuing to not know. It costs your team five minutes and it costs the customer more than that in stress.
What the call is really about
Not information. Reassurance. The customer is not going to do anything differently based on the answer; they just need to know the deal is still alive and somebody is still working it.
Which means the fix is not a faster answer. The fix is making the state of the deal visible so the question does not need to be asked.
Every any news? call is a small failure of communication that already happened three days earlier.
What visible actually means
Not a status code. Not submitted or pending. Those are internal words and they tell a customer nothing except that something is happening somewhere they cannot see.
Visible means plain language, on their phone, updated as the deal actually moves, and specific about what is waiting on them versus what is waiting on you. That last distinction matters enormously. A customer who knows the ball is in your court will wait patiently. A customer who does not know will assume the worst and start looking elsewhere.
The second-order effect
Once a customer can see their own deal, the character of the messages you get from them changes. Instead of any news, you get I just sent the pay stub, or my hours changed at work, does that matter.
That second kind of message is worth real money. It is the customer proactively giving you information that would otherwise have surfaced during funding, at the worst possible time.
And it does not end at delivery
The mistake most stores make is treating the customer-facing view as a deal tool that disappears when the car goes out the door. That is exactly backwards. The customer who has your store on their phone, with their paperwork and their warranty position and a service booking button in it, is the customer who comes back for service, comes back for a second vehicle, and sends you their brother-in-law.
You already paid to acquire them. Staying on their phone afterwards is the cheapest thing you will ever do.