You cannot answer with a rattle gun in your hand and your head in a wheel arch. Talkify is an AI receptionist for MechanicDesk workshops: it answers your phone in a real Kiwi voice, offers the services you actually book in your own wording, checks you are open that day, takes the rego and what the car is doing in the customer's own words, and lodges the booking request straight into your MechanicDesk diary for you to accept.
The workshop still says yes. MechanicDesk online booking works on requests, so the agent lodges one and tells the caller you will confirm their time shortly, the same as a request off your own website. Which day goes on which hoist stays your call, and the whole job is written up before you make it.
Everything it does, on the days when three people ring while you are torquing a wheel and the parts van is at the roller door.
Six things happen while your hands are dirty. You do none of them.
On the first ring, in a genuine New Zealand voice, using your workshop name and your greeting. No hold music, no menu, no "press one for parts". Five people can ring at once and all five get answered.
Customers say warrant, cambelt, regas and full service. Your job types say WOF, timing belt, air conditioning and something more specific. The agent matches everyday words to your titles, and asks which one you mean rather than guessing between your major and your minor.
Your open days are read from MechanicDesk on every call, never assumed and never remembered from last week, so the Friday you have just closed stops being offered the moment you close it.
Rego, make, model, year and odometer where the caller knows them, plus a contact number and an email if they have one. Everything a job card needs before anyone touches a spanner.
Not "noise". What it sounds like, when it started, whether it does it cold, which way they were turning, what light came on. The agent is told to keep the customer's own words, because that is the part that saves you a diagnostic phone call.
Straight into Diary, then Online Booking Requests, for you to accept or decline like any other online request. The caller is told you will confirm the time. You get the whole call as a text and an email within seconds.
Your job types, your open days and your diary, working the phone at the hours a workshop cannot.
The agent already knows your job types before the phone rings, in your exact titles, so it offers work you actually do instead of inventing a menu. It is kept current for you rather than retyped whenever you change something.
What a workshop does is stable. When it can do it is not. Open days are fetched on every call, so a closed week, a public holiday or a day you shut for a rebuild is never offered.
Caller, vehicle, preferred drop-off, the services and the fault in their own words, sitting in Online Booking Requests when you come off the tools. Nothing to re-key at five o'clock.
MechanicDesk online booking runs on requests, so the agent lodges one and says you will confirm the time shortly. Nobody gets told they have a slot on your hoist until you have said yes to it.
It does not quote. Pricing a job on a noise the customer has described is how workshops end up eating the difference, so it takes the detail and leaves the number to you.
"Is my car ready", "can you move me to Friday", "how much was that bill". The agent takes a proper message with the name, the rego and what they wanted, and the urgent ones are warm-transferred to whoever is free, so nobody waits on a callback that never comes.
Ring our agent and put it through its paces. Book a fake WOF, describe a noise badly, try to catch it out, ask it something it will not know. Most people ring expecting a robot and hang up having had a conversation. No sign-up, no card, answering around the clock.
Everyone thinks about the answering machine at night. That is not where the work goes missing.
Drop-offs are queued at the counter, the parts rep is waiting, two cars are on hoists and the phone has gone four times. One service adviser cannot absorb that, and the overflow used to be a busy tone or a voicemail nobody listens to until lunchtime. The agent answers all four at the same moment, in your name.
Somebody whose warrant expires on Friday rings three workshops and books the one that picks up. That is a job, plus the tyres, plus the brake pads it turns into, decided by who answered rather than by who was better. Work out what yours are worth on the missed call calculator.
The same agent, the same knowledge of your workshop, pointed in the other direction. Every one of these is live today.
Service reminders when a WOF or a logbook interval is due. "Your car is ready" calls. Win-backs to the customers you have not seen since the last warrant. You load the list, it makes the calls.
Connected to your Xero, the agent rings the invoices that have gone past due, in your name and your wording, and writes the outcome and any promise to pay onto the invoice. No commission, no collection agency.
The same brain in a chat widget on your site, in text or voice, from $49 a month. It knows the same services and the same open days as the one on the phone.
Phone surveys that ring your customer list after a service, ask how the car has been and report the answers back, without anyone at the counter sitting on hold.
The Monday after a long weekend, or the week the cold snap kills every battery in town. Call centre plans answer five, ten or fifteen callers at the same moment, with no queue and no hold music.
The Personal Assistant answers one person's own line rather than the workshop number, screens the rubbish and texts you what mattered. From $89 a month.
To start building your agent, complete the form, or ask our agent to get you started. No card needed for the demo.
Nine of the questions we hear most. If yours isn't here, ring our live demo agent on 03 242 1262, it'll either answer or queue a callback from a human.
How the agent handles a workshop day, from the eight thirty rush to the after-hours breakdown.
What happens to the calls that arrive once the roller door is down and everyone has gone home.
What Talkify connects to today, and what your agent can do once it is connected.