When someone is frantically hunting for a repair shop, they often aren’t leaving messages. If you don’t pick up quickly, they’re already dialing the shop down the street. Boom, lost work.

But hey! It’s the twenty-first century. Technology is here to help.

Today, we’d like to introduce you to Fullbay’s AI receptionist. You can set it up with your shop's information, and it answers the calls you can’t get to — the ones that come in when you’re under a truck, or after your office staff has gone home for the night. 

Here’s how it works: 

• The receptionist knows your shop — your hours, services, pricing, and any FAQs — and chats with callers, giving them accurate answers on the first call.

• It records the caller’s name, phone number and vehicle, and then emails you a summary of every call. You or your staff can follow up with the caller and book the job.

The receptionist answers the calls you or your team can’t get to. If you’ve already got folks in the front office, think of the AI as backup during busy times or as coverage on the weekends. If it’s just you, well, that means you don’t have to bring your phone into an engine compartment with you.

Fullbay’s AI receptionist is ready for you and your shop. You can learn more about it here. 

FullBay Team: is there a way to toggle off Amex ? or at least cap it to minimize the potential impact of a chargeback?

Something we've wanted to do for a long time just went live, and we wanted to share it here first.

We just launched Fullbay Insights — a free, publicly accessible benchmark resource for the heavy-duty repair industry.

What it is: Fullbay processes real operational data from thousands of commercial repair shops — service orders, parts transactions, technician hours, invoices — every single day. We built Fullbay Insights to take that data and turn it into industry benchmarks that every shop can actually use.

You can track three metrics:

• Technician Efficiency — how efficiently techs are working relative to industry norms

• Revenue Per Technician — how much revenue the average tech is generating

• Billable Hours Per Technician — how many hours techs are billing across the industry

These are updated on an ongoing basis, drawn from anonymized, aggregated data across the platform, with more data and metrics coming soon. No individual shop data is ever exposed.

Why we built it: Shop owners have been making decisions about parts pricing, labor rates, and staffing without any reliable industry data to benchmark against. You've been running on gut feel and word of mouth because there was nothing better.

We're in a unique position to fix that — and we think the whole industry benefits when shops have access to better information.

One thing worth knowing: This is free for everyone. You don't need to be a Fullbay customer to use it. We built it for the industry, not just for us.

Check it out here: fullbay.com/insights 

Would love to hear what you think — and if there are other metrics you'd want to see added down the road, drop them in the replies. We're paying attention!

• How do you decide what's mobile vs. bay?

• Any repairs people try in the field that should be shop-only?

• For shops doing both, does mobile bring more work back in?

Most software gets built top-down: a company decides what you need, ships it, and expects you to like it and pay for it. We'd rather build it the other way—you teach me what you actually need to be successful, and we design around that. We are your students.

If you've ever wanted to talk shop with someone who has a direct line to what gets designed and built—a feature that's bugging you, a workflow that never quite fits, or just how you run things day to day—here's my calendar: https://calendar.app.google/zMEwb6exfxU2JHx58. No agenda, no sales pitch, just listening and having a conversation that leads to design and product decisions in the software you use to be successful.

Caveat:
I'm not tech support or IT—I don't have the answers you might hope for.
Not every wish list item is guaranteed to be granted. In User Experience, we find direction through consensus of collected evidence. This means that because something works for your shop, it may not work for others.
I'm also not customer success. I cannot make you offers or deals.