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.

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gowld 3 hours ago | parent [-]

What are you doing to your car that requires such a close relationship with the repair shop?

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alwa 3 hours ago | parent [-]

Responsible (directly or indirectly) for quite a few of them, mostly oldish and wheezy; I’m not myself mechanical; and we use the shop mostly for routine maintenance—rotate the tires every few thousand miles, swap the brake pads, deal with the oil changes/fluids/filters, etc.

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!

	▲	ryandrake 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Plus, maybe the customer would prefer to support a business that invests in and employs from the local community, even if it costs a little more. Or they see it as a quality signal. If I call a plumber who outsourced their reception to a call center to save a few bucks, I'm starting to think, "What else is he willing to do to save a few bucks?"