Mechanic working beneath a vehicle on a lift

Custom AI receptionists for auto repair and collision shops

Start free pilotFree pilot. About 14 days to a working line, no call limit.

Why a collision shop needs a custom AI receptionist

Most calls to a shop are existing customers asking where their car is. AnswerAI gives them the status, books estimates for everyone else, and leaves anything about the insurance claim to your team.

A repair that needs more than one calibration now averages over 17 days keys-to-keys (more than four days longer than a repair that needs none) and calibrations appear on 35.6% of estimates. Every one of those days is a customer without a car, calling to ask where it is. AnswerAI answers that call in seconds, in the same words every time, and books the estimates coming in behind it, so your advisors stay on the counter instead of walking to a terminal to read one line off a screen.

What do people actually say when they call a shop?

Two very different calls on one line. One is a customer in the middle of a bad week asking where their car is. The other is a stranger asking a question the shop cannot answer without seeing the vehicle.

  • “Just checking on the Civic - any word?”

    The highest-volume call in a collision shop and the least valuable to have a human answer. It needs a status, not a conversation.

  • “I got rear-ended this morning. What do I even do first?”

    The caller has been in a collision in the last few hours. They want a sequence (tow, claim, estimate, rental), not a price.

  • “My deductible is $1,000. Am I paying that or is the other guy's insurance?”

    A question about someone else's claim decision. Answering it wrongly creates an expectation the shop will be held to.

  • “How much to fix a dented quarter panel?”

    Unanswerable over the phone, and the number a caller remembers is whatever they hear first.

Won't it say something about the estimate or the claim we get held to?

Only if it is built to speculate, and yours is not. Your line gives status, books the estimate and captures claim details, and it will not characterise coverage, fault or a repair total, in any wording, on any call.

Collision is the only industry on this site with a third party on the first call. A customer phones about a repair, but the answer usually depends on an insurer's decision: coverage, deductible, rental eligibility, whether the vehicle is a total loss. Anything the shop says about that is heard as a commitment, and with total loss frequency at a record the odds that a caller's expectation and the insurer's decision diverge are not small.

That is what we build against. Your line owns everything a shop can genuinely answer on a phone (where the vehicle is in the process, when the next update lands, what the shop still needs from the customer, and getting the next caller booked in for an estimate), and it gives those answers identically at 7am, at 4:50 on a Friday and at midnight. Coverage, fault and repair totals go straight to the advisor with the file open, because that is where a binding answer belongs. A counter three deep will improvise to get a caller off the line. A line built to wording you approved will not.

And that discipline is what makes it worth having, because the volume problem in a collision shop is not sales. It is status. When a repair runs 17 days and the customer has no car, they will call, reasonably, several times. Those calls arrive at a counter that is three deep at drop-off and pickup, handled by someone who has to walk to a terminal to answer a question with a one-line answer. That is the call your line takes off them, every time.

The mechanical side is the same shape with a different clock. A shop that quotes over the phone is guessing, and a caller who hears a number treats it as a price. The safe pattern is the trades pattern: a stated diagnostic or teardown fee with the condition attached, and an appointment.

How many status calls a 17-day repair generates, shown as a model, not a measurement

Built from CCC's published cycle times, and this is the volume your line absorbs. Every step is arithmetic you can redo with your own car count, and every figure below is either sourced or labelled as an assumption.

A model: every input sourced and shown, so you can run it on your own numbers

  1. Keys-to-keys, repairs with multiple calibrations17+ daysCCC Crash Course. 13 days with no calibrations, 15.5 with one.
  2. Share of estimates now including calibrations35.6%CCC Crash Course, up from 28.3%.
  3. If a customer without a car calls twice a week during that repair≈ 5 callsAssumption, not data. Change it to what your shop actually sees.
  4. Across 30 vehicles in the shop at once≈ 150 status callsArithmetic. Substitute your own car count.

The busiest phone in a collision shop is not new business - it's thirty people without cars asking the same one-line question about repairs already in the building.

Nick Lovett, Founder, AnswerAI

The quickest way to know is to call it as a customer whose car has been in your shop nine days, and see whether it gives a straight answer.

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Questions shop owners ask

That is the main job here. Status is the highest-volume call in a collision shop and the one that least needs a person, provided the line is reading real progress rather than guessing.

No. Coverage, deductibles, rental eligibility and total-loss decisions belong to the insurer, and anything a shop says about them is heard as a promise. The line captures the claim details and routes the question to someone who can see the file.

It can state a diagnostic or teardown fee with your conditions attached and book the estimate. It will not guess a repair total from a description, because the first number a caller hears is the one they remember.

They usually need a sequence rather than a price: whether the car is drivable, whether a tow is needed, what to bring, what the shop needs from them. That is scriptable, and it is a better first impression than a voicemail.

Mechanical and collision run different stacks and they differ a lot in what an outside system can read. We will tell you specifically what status data we can pull from yours before you commit, and if the honest answer is that a repair status has to be pushed to us rather than pulled, we will say that instead of implying otherwise.

Let's build one for your shop and find out.

We build a working line on your process, your status updates and your rules about what may not be said on a claim, and you call it yourself. About 14 days. No call limit during the pilot.

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