Solution · By industry
AI for auto repair shops: the estimate approved in writing and the customer updated without anyone picking up the phone
The car is on the lift waiting for a yes nobody answers, and the phone keeps ringing to ask if it's ready. That gets automated — vehicle check-in, estimate chasing and status updates — on top of the shop software you already run, and you feel it in this week's open bays.
The problem
The car sits waiting on a yes nobody chased properly
- The vehicle comes in, gets diagnosed, and the estimate just sits there: three calls, straight to voicemail, and the lift is still holding a car nobody is allowed to touch.
- Every "is mine ready?" is a technician putting the tool down, wiping their hands and losing the thread of the job in front of them.
- Check-in gets typed twice: plate and mileage on paper first, then into the system when there's a gap — usually at seven in the evening.
- Last year's service customer never comes back because nobody reminded them. The history is right there in the system; what's missing is anyone with time to look at it.
Cost of staying the same
A shop doesn't bill technician hours: it bills bay hours on a car it's allowed to touch. Every estimate pending approval blocks a bay, and every status call interrupts a job in progress — work takes longer and less work comes in. Meanwhile the book of vehicles that already came through your door, the cheapest business you will ever win back, goes cold because nobody calls it.
The solution
An agent that checks the vehicle in, chases the approval and pushes the status out — on top of the shop software you already have
- 1We connect an agent to your shop management system and to WhatsApp or SMS: the booking and the check-in come in through the customer's channel — plate, mileage, symptom, photos of the vehicle on arrival — and come out as a repair order, with nothing typed twice.
- 2The estimate leaves your system and the agent chases it: sends it, explains each line in plain language, answers the questions, collects the yes or no in writing and logs it on the order. If there's no reply it follows up on its own, and flags the service manager when it's genuinely time to call.
- 3Status goes out before anyone asks: checked in, waiting on parts, ready for pickup. The customer stops calling because they already know; the technician stops picking up.
- 4Working from vehicle history, the agent reminds customers of the service, the oil change and the next inspection, and offers a slot. All measured: time to yes, estimates approved in writing, inbound status calls and appointments recovered from the book.
What changes
What you stop losing
The gap between "estimate sent" and "estimate approved" is the shop's real lever: while it waits, the bay doesn't bill. The agent chases the yes on the channel where customers actually reply.
Mechanism
Status calls stop coming in because the update went out first. The job in progress stops getting interrupted every twenty minutes.
Mechanism
The approval lands in writing, attached to the repair order: no more "I never authorised that" at invoicing time.
Mechanism
What we measure: average time to estimate approval, % of estimates approved in writing, inbound calls asking about status, and appointments recovered from vehicle history.
What we measure
Spec sheet
- Work it removes
- chasing estimate approvals by hand and answering the phone to "is my car ready yet?"
- Typical setup
- 2–4 weeks
- Input
- a booking, a vehicle check-in or an estimate issued in your shop management system
- Output
- repair order created, estimate approved in writing, and the customer told the status and the next service due
- Works with
- WhatsApp Business APIAudatex
- Can connect to
- Your shop management system (DMS)Estimating and labor-time platforms (Mitchell)Telephony / voice agent
- What we measure
- average time to estimate approval% of estimates approved in writinginbound calls asking about vehicle statusappointments recovered from vehicle history
- Good fit for
- independent repair shops, body shops and multi-brand garages with several bays, estimates that need approval before work starts, and a book of vehicles with service history
- Not a fit for
- diagnosing the fault and deciding what gets repaired, which stay with the technician
Frequently asked questions
That's the question that decides the project, and the answer depends on your system. If yours exposes its data — repair orders, estimates, vehicle history — we connect over the API and the agent reads and writes without you changing anything. If it's closed, there's a bridge to build: we find that out in week one and tell you the exact cost before we invoice anything. What we won't ask you to do is switch systems; a shop doesn't stop to migrate.
No, and it's worth seeing the difference before you pay twice. The AI inside your system helps you inside a screen: suggests the labor time, drafts the note, looks up the fault code. What blocks your bays doesn't happen inside a screen — it happens between your system and a customer who hasn't replied to the estimate. The vendor copilot doesn't reach that far, because it doesn't talk to your customer or chase an approval. We're not selling you another system: we build the agent on top of the one you already run.
For an expensive repair, sure — and your service manager still makes that call, with the diagnosis in front of them and a customer who already has the context. But for "is it ready?" nobody prefers to call: they prefer to know without calling. The agent takes the repetitive part — check-in, status, reminders, chasing the sign-off — and gives you the phone back for the conversations that actually deserve one.
It gets recorded exactly as it happened, which is the case that leaks most over the phone. The agent sends the estimate line by line — urgent, recommended, can wait — and collects the answer the same way. The repair order ends up holding what was approved, what was declined and what was deferred, and that last one comes back as a reminder in a few months instead of dying in a conversation nobody wrote down.
Want it running in your business?
You’ve pinned the problem. We ship the fix and leave it measured.