Yeah, it’s getting harder to tell. At some point the difference won’t be in the voice itself, but in how the conversation flows.

I think the question of lost opportunities versus costs is the best thing to look at here. You could pay a receptionist like 50-60k a year but they have to bring in the work. Maybe the AI dumps a percentage over a real receptionist but they still bring in more than the mailbox. But there's a cost to the AI too.

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?

A barber won’t be able to service that many customers anyway. A barbershop which gets a phone call every two minutes probably has several barbers on staff and a receptionist.

No - £150/mo for the service. I asked him and he said they take the calls, write up notes and he handles the callbacks/etc himself.

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.

Well presumably 150 is what you pay to use the service, and they have like 100+ companies using it.

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.

Generally, by whether they know what’s going on at the shop. Usually if I’m calling on the phone, it’s for a specific answer that’s not gettable through a computer.

“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.

Wait, are you not calling more than one shop every time?

Would redirecting them to a website where they can go through a guided intake and get some confirmation of a callback? A well designed UI that allows them to ID their vehicle (make/model/year) and the issue they're having? HTML5 has decent speech to text out of the gate and they can just talk it out.

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?

Related - Monro Muffler Brake apparently switched to an offshore call center model to handle scheduling every single auto shop location. I hear nothing but complaints from both fellow customers as well as the shop managers themselves about their local phone number being ripped away from them and handed off to a call center to try to schedule vehicle service from thousands of miles away.