It rings while you are with a customer. Now someone picks up anyway.
An assistant that takes the call when nobody in the shop can — giving opening hours and prices from your own list, taking down appointment requests and callbacks, and passing on anything that needs judgement.
This is not a recording. Your microphone, our system, an answer formulated on the spot.
Three steps, and no call is lost.
The phone rings as usual
On your own number. Only calls you do not pick up within a few rings are diverted — you keep first refusal.
The assistant answers
In your shop’s name, with your opening hours and your prices, and asks what the caller needs.
You get the written note
Name, number, what it was about — on WhatsApp or by e-mail, right after the call. Nothing to listen back to.
The point is not that it talks. It is what it does with what it hears.
A voice on the line is the easy part. The value sits in what happens afterwards — and in the sentences it refuses to say.
Prices from your list, not from the model
It reads out what is in your own price file. Where there is no price, it says so and offers a callback instead of guessing.
Appointment requests land in the calendar
The caller says when it suits; the request arrives as a booking waiting for your yes — not as a note you still have to type in.
A written note, not a voicemail
You read in ten seconds what would take a minute to listen to. Searchable later, and readable in a noisy workshop.
It hands over rather than improvise
Complaints, unusual cases, anything with money or health in it: passed straight to you. A wrong sentence on the phone is expensive.
It knows what day it is
Bank holidays, Sundays, your closing day: “tomorrow” is worked out from the real calendar, not invented.
You hear how it speaks before it goes live
Tone, greeting, what it may and may not promise: agreed in writing beforehand and changeable at any time. Exactly what you are doing right now on this page.
What it brings you.
Not what the technology can do — what changes about your day.
- The missed call leaves no trace
- A message waits for you. A call that rings out does not: you never learn who it was or what they wanted. That is the one enquiry you cannot follow up.
- The customer in front of you stays first
- Nobody at the counter has to be interrupted for “are you open on Saturday”. The routine questions stop competing with the paying customer.
- No hold music, no queue
- Two callers at once are both answered. Nobody waits, and nobody hangs up while waiting.
- The lunch break stops costing you
- The hour when the phone is unmanned is the hour people have time to call. That gap closes without anyone giving up their break.
- Nothing to install for the caller
- They dial the number they have always dialled. No app, no menu, no “press one”.
- You can switch it off in a second
- It is a call diversion. Cancel it and the phone rings exactly as before — no contract to unwind, no system to remove.
Honestly: this one is new.
The written assistant has been running in my own shop since May — 1,190 conversations, 308 customers, four in ten of them outside opening hours. Those numbers are measured, and you can read them on the WhatsApp page.
On the phone I am at the beginning. The system you just spoke to is real and it is mine, but it is not yet answering a live number in a shop every day. I am looking for the first two or three businesses to put it on a real line with, at a price that reflects that.
I would rather write that here than have you find it out later.
How many calls do you not get to today?
You will not know the number — nobody does. Tell me what people ring you about most, and I will tell you what the assistant can take off your hands, and what is better left ringing.