Posted by mooreds 9 hours ago
For example, even if it shows a boost of $100,000 per month in revenue. It could likely have been achieved with a shared virtual assistant / receptionist for about $200-1000 per month (depending on exactly call volumes).
So really, the revenue was already lost and going forward you’re just deciding to capture it. You've created a more complicated mouse trap than what was already available to you. The difference is saving a couple hundred dollars of labor less whatever your AI/tech costs are. I’d still go the human route because it’s more future proof and if this is a luxury service, human service is always going to feel more luxurious.
> He’s under the hood all day. The phone rings, he can’t answer, the customer hangs up and calls someone else
the mechanic is already very busy in the first place so unless he plans on expanding shop the whole thing is a waste of time
So we cannot always assume that the business owner (especially the solo mom and pops) wants more business. Good ones are already very busy.
Y'all are in the wrong business :D
I guess as a plumber having enough of the type of jobs that can wait a week that you can turn away the urgent calls might be one of those feature-not-a-bug type situations.
Not everyone works all three or wants to do more than one of these groups. There’s different levels of demand, pay, competition at each.
You can shut the entire network off, shower/poop at neighbours places or work, laundry at the local self-laundry shop and brush you teeth with a bootle of water. Inconvenient sure, but it would as much problematic to be denied electricity for a long time: lights off, fridge off, no heating, boiler off… there’s alternatives but the usual way for us is to share a long electric cord by an open window… so obligatory work-and-stay-at-home if you’re lucky to have an appropriate activity.
He wouldn’t care to get these extra jobs if he’s full, so why do this to begin with. He could however hire another mechanic if he books more jobs and grow his business to one of shop owner instead of mechanic (no idea if this is his motivation or not).
It’s likely he’s not actually under the hood all day but If phone rings twice a day and it just happens to be he’s under the hood at those times, he misses the call and it’s like he’s under the hood all day. It doesn’t mean he has no capacity, it just means he’s missing some calls throughout the day.
I know it's not that simple, but my gut says theres value to at least hearing out the people taking action to call you. Especially if that's automated and low cost to you.
If I were already an existing customer and just wanted to schedule an oil change, it'd be fine, though I'd probably just schedule on the website anyway. I'm really only going to call in if I have an unusual circumstance and actually need to speak with someone.
If you only have 4 options, just give me the old school list of voice options and I'll press 1 through 4, in less time, and being only moderately annoyed.
But a knowledgeable AI system as described in the article - that knows what it knows and tells you when it doesn't - could work great. If it had access to inventory and calendar, it might have worked for you. The question is whether the implementation lives up to the high expectations set by the articles.
In fact, decision trees are nice because they tell your more or less up front what they're capable of.
What really sucks (AI or decision tree, either way) is when they don't let you easily speak with someone.
"Hi, I'm the LargeBank AI Assistant. How can I help you?" "I'd like to know the balance of my checking account."
And then authenticate and get the balance as usual. Simpler and faster. Agreed that it becomes a problem if it's seen as a replacement for human agents though. In an ideal world it would actually free up the human agents for when they're actually needed. In reality it'll probably be some of each.
I was on the wrong end of some (presumably) LLM powered support via ebay's chatbot earlier this week and it was a completely terrible experience. But that's because ebay haven't done a very good job, not because the idea of LLM-powered support is fundamentally flawed.
When implemented well it can work great.
Unfortunately, the human behind it was not technically-savvy enough to clarify a point, so I had to either accept the LLM response, or quit trying. But at least it saved me the time from trying to explain to a level 1 support person that I knew exactly what I was asking about.
More generally, when done well, RAG is really great. I was recently trying out a new bookkeeping software (manager.io), and really appreciated the chatbot they've added to their website. Basically, instead of digging through the documentation and forums to try to find answers to questions, I can just ask. It's great.
If my mechanic answered with an LLM I’d take my car elsewhere.
Just to be clear, the LLM assistant could be a great supplement to the app for people with disabilities or those who struggle with phone apps for whatever reason, but for most people the LLM phone call seems worse.
I'll switch to the AI chat where it lets you select your order and I'll do the same thing, and it has no issue telling me it can give me a refund and process it instantly.
So my case, the two seem to behave differently. And these are on items that say they're eligible for refunds to begin with when you first order them.
in that medium, llms are so much better than old phonetrees and waiting on hold
Spoken word is still the most information dense way for humans to communicate abstract ideas in real time.
Reading > Listening
Speaking > Typing
If you want raw performance on both sides, It is better to dictate an email that gets read later.
How much does it cost to have an outsourced receptionist? Even if it is 500 a month if we are really talking about thousands of dollars per month lost your ROI is still crazy.
I think most folks already wouldn't be able to tell, with the modern TTS.
It's like AI photos, they fool you unless you're looking for it.
This is the critical data —» how many people hang up on the AI chatbot vs how many people hang up on the voice message prompt.
If it is even close, well, the AI needs to be improved.
If the AI is way ahead, but still loses/drops more than a live receptionist (outsourced or in-house), the AI either needs improvement, or to be dumped for a live receptionist, and that's kind of a spreadsheet problem (how many jobs lost in each case, vs costs).
But the real question you should also ask is what else can that human do for you that the AI can't because they have eyes and ears and hands?
If we take OP’s post at face value, presumably his brother is already at 100% capacity otherwise he wouldn’t be missing all these calls.
I don’t know if he’s “tested”, but he said he’s happy enough with the service. We don’t always have to AB test every possible option - sometimes good enough is good enough.
The model is exactly like Planet Fitness or similar gyms: It doesn't work if everyone visits at once, but you plan on most people using it once a week.
That said, a good service writer is worth their weight in gold. Also, they are typically going to be the person you end up selling the business to when you retire. Most mechanics aren't good enough at the business side of things to actually buy, but service writers are.
“Hey can you look out and see if Joe’s almost done with the blue Chrysler?” is an easy ask for the phone answerer at my local Joe’s shop (it’s his wife, and as a bonus she’ll also holler at him or his crew to hurry up because @alwa is waiting on it).
Contrast with the grant-funded pharmacy I use. Some management type suggested they could deal with their insane level of overwork by automating away the phones to a hostile and labyrinthine network of IVRs. Oh, it has “AI,” but only to force choices between forks in decisions trees corresponding to questions I didn’t have—and every path still eventually ends in “this voice mailbox is full, goodbye.”
After literal hours of my life trying to wrestle their IVRs into helping—I do sympathize with their workload and don’t want to be a special snowflake—I now drive 30 minutes to ask questions face to face.
In general I’ve maxed out what’s discoverable by automated means before I call. So a call center is both useless and insulting.
Partly as a preventative measure: we trust them. In the rare cases when they find something, it’s real. As a consequence we get ahead of brewing problems.
Plus loyalty, to some extent; we try to throw work their way when we can, even if we probably could handle it ourselves. The relationship between our families goes back a good 60 years by now.
Fully grant that my situation is unlikely to be representative. And no shade toward OP—it sounds like a cool project thoughtfully done, and a real improvement over the status quo for her relative!
Obviously that process could happen purely via voice but I think there's not as much love for walking through forms in a phone call.
If Joe has a PC in the shop with a tailored UI, he could get pings of pending requests and when he comes up for air, update the intake (via voice to minimize greasy hands) and initiate a call back then and there?
Christ just hire some local teenager or whomever. There's people who will work for minimum wage.
More to the point - does this garage even have the time and space to service more vehicles? Generating a bunch of new low-value/low-loyalty customers takes up time and space and might have a lower return-per-hour while making it harder to retain higher value returning customers.
Additionally, as "luxury mechanic" (apparently specializing in BMW but servicing other makes) you'll need to appeal to "luxury drivers" and bolting on more crap that makes the experience worse is probably not the way to do that.
Regarding the AI receptionists, from the calls I've listened to, there's still a bit of the uncanny valley/overlapping speech issues that I'm unsure are ever fixable just due to latency.
But for low margin businesses like contracting and (I imagine) auto repair where labor is your most expensive cost, these owners are doing anything they can to reduce their overhead.
Here’s the video: https://youtu.be/QmH9b27xm6k
It was very impressive at that time. They did raise money after that pitch, but they ended up pivoting (multiple times). They IPOd in 2017
Then you tell it to just not answer off the wall questions etc. and if you are using a good model it will resist casual attempts.
I don't see being able to ask nonsense questions as being a big deal for an average small business. But you could put a guardrail model in front to make it a lot harder if it was worth it.
But maybe soon we will not even realise we speak to a robot, given the current speed of ai development.
I wonder how that will erode trust in calls. I moved from cold emailing and cold LinkedIn to cold calling because of the massive amounts of ai spam I have to compete with. But maybe cold calling will die soon as well if the robots emerge.