AI receptionist for garages and MOT centres. The same four questions, all day.
What does an MOT cost, when can you take it, how long will you have it, and how do I get to work. Carrie answers all four properly, books the car in, and does it while you are under one with a torch in your mouth.
She does not diagnose a noise and she does not authorise work. Both of those need somebody with the car in front of them.
How does an AI receptionist work for a garage?
An AI receptionist answers the questions that make up most of your calls. It books the car in against a real ramp, and leaves the work you cannot delegate with you. It is the same receptionist we set up for every trade and local service, and for a garage more of the calls have a fixed answer than for any of them.
The phone never stops
You are under a car or up to your elbows in a wheel arch. Somebody has to come out, wipe their hands and answer a question they have answered over and over this week.
Carrie gives the actual answer
The MOT price, the next free slot, roughly how long it takes, and whether there is a courtesy car that day. Then the registration, the make and what they think is wrong.
The car is booked against a real ramp
Not a list of callbacks. A booking, at a time you have, with the registration on it, so the morning is planned rather than whatever turns up.
A Wednesday on the ramps
Four on the ramps, two waiting, and the phone went thirty-one times between eight and five. You or one of the lads came out to answer maybe eighteen of those. Every one of those eighteen cost you five minutes and half your concentration, and about fourteen of them were the same four questions.
The other thirteen rang out. In this trade that is nearly always somebody who then rang the garage on the next road, because an MOT is an MOT and the only thing that varies is who can take it on Thursday.
With her on the phone: all thirty-one answered, twenty-two dealt with completely and never passed to anybody, nine bookings taken with registrations, and four calls that genuinely needed you, saved up and handed over together rather than one at a time all day. Nobody came off a ramp to say the same price out loud again.
What garages ask about it
Mostly about the booking: whether she knows what a ramp can take in a day, and how the yes on extra work gets given.
What prices will she give?
Every fixed price you set: the MOT, the service grades, the common tests. Those genuinely are fixed, so a caller gets a real number at the moment they asked for one.
Anything that depends on somebody looking at the car comes from you, after somebody has looked at it. Anybody who has quoted a brake job down the phone and then found the discs knows why.
What happens when somebody describes a noise?
She writes down exactly what they said, in their own words, including the noise they made imitating it.
That is more useful than it sounds when the car is in front of you on Thursday. The diagnosis stays with the person under the bonnet.
Does it know how long a job takes so it does not overfill the day?
It books against the times you set for each job type and against how many ramps you have. An MOT is not a service and a service is not a cambelt, and if Thursday has one slot left it offers one slot.
What about the courtesy car? That decides half my bookings.
She checks whether it is free on that date before offering it, because promising one that is out is the fastest way to lose a customer on the morning. Where it is not available she says so and offers the days it is.
Can it ring the customer to authorise extra work?
She does the chasing: the three attempts to reach somebody who is at work. That is the thing that actually delays a car going back.
The yes comes from a person to a person, with the price beside it. Committing somebody to two hundred pounds of work is a conversation, and it is one worth having properly.
Half my callers ask if they can wait while it is done.
She answers that honestly from your own diary. If an MOT takes fifty minutes and you can do it while they wait on a Tuesday but not a Friday, that is what she says.
Does it deal with fleet and trade work?
Yes, and those calls are worth separating. A fleet manager with six vans wants dates and an invoice, not a price for one MOT, so she takes the company, the number of vehicles and when they are due, and hands it to you as a conversation rather than a booking.
What about people ringing about a car that has failed?
That call goes to you, every time. Somebody asking what a failure means and what it will cost to put right needs a person who has seen the sheet.
Can it send MOT reminders?
Yes, and it is the easiest work a garage will ever win back. A reminder a fortnight before the date, with the free slots on it, brings back customers who would otherwise have gone wherever was convenient that week.
Does it answer when we are shut?
Yes. Evenings and Sundays are when people notice their MOT is due, and a garage that takes a booking on a Sunday night has the car on Monday.
How is it set up?
Twenty minutes: your fixed prices, your job times, how many ramps, what the courtesy car situation is, and what always comes to you. Then you listen to the first call.
Can an assistant tell somebody what an MOT costs here?
Price and the next free day are what vary between garages, and people now put both to an assistant instead of ringing round. One answer comes back with names in it, and Google writes the same sort of answer above the blue links.
- A price behind a phone call is not a price anything can quote. The MOT, the service, the diagnostic hour and the makes you work on can all be written down.
- A free slot is only real if somebody picks up to book it. She takes the registration and the day while you are under a car.
- This is ordinary search work. Google's own guide says its AI answers run on the same ranking systems, so there is no separate thing to sell you.
Where else does she answer?
The phone is one of seven. Enquiries come through your Google listing as well as your website, and through a Bing Places listing, which is the one that gets skipped.
The AI receptionist
All seven channels, and what she covers on each one. See the AI receptionist
A website for your line of work
The site that answers the four questions before anybody rings. See details
Your Google listing
The calls it sends you, answered instead of ringing out. See details
What else is worth reading?
Every page here answers one question properly rather than skimming five. These are the others, and each one says what it is before you click it.
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Foothold AI: websites and AI for local service businesses
A website that gets found, a back office that runs the day, and an app for your team. From £295 to set up and £99 a month. Suffolk based, UK wide.
Where we work: Suffolk and north Essex
Twenty towns across Suffolk and north Essex, from Sudbury. Most are twenty or thirty minutes away, and the person who builds your site comes out.
How many times did you say the MOT price yesterday?
Now count the ones who rang, got nothing, and went to the garage on the next road. An MOT is an MOT.
Twenty minutes with Chad. Nothing to pay and nothing to sign. The whole receptionist, and all seven channels, are on the AI receptionist page.