The Shop Phone Now Answers Itself. One Pilot Booked $1,200 a Week

Fullbay, the shop management software running inside thousands of heavy-duty repair bays, has put an AI receptionist on its customers’ phone lines. It is called Claudia, it answers around the clock, and it works off shop-specific information — hours, services, pricing, the questions callers ask every day. It recognises the caller’s language and continues in it, and it emails the shop a summary of every call it took.

The number worth stopping on is from the early pilot. Fullbay reports that one shop generated more than $1,200 a week in repair orders through calls the system handled. Those were not calls a service writer took. They were calls that used to ring out.

Why the phone was the weak point

The economics explain themselves. Fullbay’s own 2026 State of Heavy-Duty Repair survey — nearly 900 professionals, drawn from 3,400 shops — found 54% of shops understaffed in 2025, technician wages up 14.1% to a median $36.50 an hour, and median shop labour rates reaching $149 an hour.

At $149 billable, pulling a technician out from under a truck to answer a ringing phone is expensive. Leaving it to ring is more expensive, and every shop owner knows it. As Fullbay CEO Trent Broberg put it in the trade coverage of the launch, “answering a phone call isn’t always physically possible.” That is not a technology problem anyone was going to fix with more headcount at those wage numbers.

The parts side of the same call

Here is the part that matters if you sell parts rather than labour. Fullbay shops processed $5.04 billion in service order commerce in 2025, with another $1.5 billion in parts revenue moving through the same system. Nearly every one of those parts lines began as somebody trying to reach somebody: a shop calling for availability, a counter calling back with a cross-reference, a fleet manager chasing an ETA at 9pm because a truck is down.

One end of that conversation is now answered by something that never steps away from the desk. The other end — the distributor’s counter — usually still is not. And parts counters run the same arithmetic as the shops: thinnest staffing at the busiest hour, phones peaking exactly when the counter is deepest in will-call, and closed at the hours breakdowns actually happen. If you want to see what an always-answered counter looks like for a parts business, that is the gap it closes.

Where to start before next week

Pull last month’s call log from your phone system or carrier. Count three things: calls under twenty seconds, calls outside opening hours, and calls between 7 and 9am. That is your unanswered pile, and it is usually larger than anyone at the counter believes. Multiply it by your average order value and you have the cost of doing nothing, in your own numbers rather than a vendor’s.

Then write down the five questions your counter answers every single day — is it in stock, what does it cross to, does it ship today, what is the account minimum, where are you. Those are what an agent should take first, and they are the calls a human least needs to be on.

Last, decide the handoff rule before you switch anything on: which calls go straight to a person, and how fast. The goal is not to remove the human from the parts conversation. It is to make sure every call and message gets answered on whatever channel it arrives on, so the human is on the ones worth their hour.