The phone is in the office and your technicians are in the bays. A voice AI answering service for auto repair picks up the call your service advisor cannot, books the service or the MOT, and gets the job on the board before the caller rings the garage down the road.
Books into the systems you already use
How much to fix a check engine light. Is my car ready yet. Have you got my part in. Can you MOT it on Thursday. Do you work on my make. That is most of a garage’s inbound volume, and every one of those calls lands on the service advisor, who is also writing up the car in front of them and chasing a supplier about a back-ordered part.
So the phone goes unanswered, and the caller does not leave a message. A car that will not start is not a decision anybody sits on, so they ring the next shop on the map. The work you lose this way never appears in a report. It appears as a quiet week and a car count nobody can explain.
An AI voice agent takes the routine calls off the counter. It books the service, gives an honest status on a vehicle that is still in the bay, quotes the jobs you have fixed prices for, and hands your advisor only the calls that genuinely need a person. The advisor stays with the customer in front of them.
Reads your live diary and offers real slots against the right bay, or against the tester on the days you have one in. It knows how long you allow for a diagnostic, which days you keep for waiters, and which jobs need the car left with you.
Status calls are a large share of what a garage answers and almost none of them need a human. The agent looks the job up by registration, reads the real status out of your system, and says plainly whether it is in diagnosis, waiting on a part, or ready for collection.
Quotes the work you have already priced, MOT, an oil service, pads and discs, a tyre fitted, and explains your diagnostic charge for everything else. It will not put a number on a fault nobody has looked at, which is where phone quotes turn into arguments at collection.
Picks up the calls that arrive while both advisors are already on the counter, and the ones at seven in the evening from somebody whose car has just refused to start. Those get booked into tomorrow morning instead of going to whoever answers first.
Works the list of advisories and deferred jobs your customers put off, the tyre near the limit, the leaking shock, the service four months overdue, and rings them when they are due. It is the follow-up every shop intends to do and no advisor ever has the counter time for.
Calls the customers whose MOT or service is coming up and books them straight into the diary rather than sending a text they ignore. It handles the seasonal runs too, the March and September MOT peaks, the winter tyre changeover, the pre-holiday checks.
Only for work you have already priced. An MOT, an oil service, pads on a common model, a tyre fitted, your diagnostic charge: you give us the figures and it quotes them the same way every time. For anything else it explains that the car has to be looked at first and books the diagnostic, because a number invented over the phone becomes an argument when the customer collects. Be clear-eyed about the trade: some callers only want a figure and will ring elsewhere rather than book, and you will lose a few of those. Most owners decide that is the right side to be on after one comeback over a phone quote.
Yes. It works off your live diary, so it only offers test slots on days you have a tester in and only for the classes you are approved for. It can take the registration, check the MOT due date against the DVSA history where your system exposes it, and tell the caller whether they are booking early or leaving it late. If your MOT diary and your repair diary are separate, it books into the right one instead of dropping a test into a general repair bay.
Yes, and for most shops this is the biggest single relief for the front counter. The agent finds the job by registration or by name, reads the current status from your system, and answers plainly: still in diagnosis, waiting on a part, ready for collection. When the news is bad, a part that has not landed, it says so and offers a call back the moment it changes, which is what stops the same customer ringing three more times before lunch. It never invents a promised time your technicians have not given it.
The ones garages actually run: Tekmetric, Shopmonkey, Mitchell 1, AutoLeap, Shop-Ware and Protractor across the US and Canada, Garage Hive, MAM Autowork Online, TechMan and Dragon2000 in the UK, plus anything exposing an API or a Zapier connector. Where a platform will not let us write a booking directly, the agent books into a synced calendar and posts a structured note carrying the registration, the customer, the symptom and the promised time, so your advisor confirms it in seconds rather than retyping it. We tell you at discovery which of those is a genuine two-way integration and which is a one-way write, because it changes what the agent is allowed to promise a caller.
It follows the rule you give it. Usually that means establishing whether the car is drivable, where it is, and whether it is blocking a road, then either putting the caller through to a mobile, taking the details for the recovery firm you use, or booking the vehicle in for when it arrives on a truck. It will not tell anybody it is safe to drive a car it cannot see. Out of hours it takes the full story, so the first thing on your board in the morning is a written-up job rather than a voicemail somebody has to play twice.
Yes, and it is usually the highest-return job we give it. Every shop is sitting on advisories and recommendations the customer put off, and almost nobody has the counter time to ring through that list. The agent works it methodically, reminds the customer what was found on their car and when it was found, and books the ones who are ready now. That is a volume of outbound calling no advisor is realistically going to do between check-ins and collections.
It can capture it properly, which is what your technician actually needs. It asks what your advisor would ask: when the noise happens, at what speed, whether it is under braking or on turns, whether a warning light is on, how long it has been doing it. All of that goes onto the job with the registration and the mileage, and the car gets booked in to be looked at. What it will not do is guess what the noise is, and it should not, because naming a part over the phone commits you to a repair before anyone has had the car on a lift.
We will build a demo agent using your prices, your diary and your MOT slots, so you can ring it yourself and hear how it handles a Monday morning.
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