90 days of Connie at our own repair shop
Connie was built and battle-tested in a real business: the founder's own computer repair shop in South Bend, Indiana. Different trade, same problem as yours: the phone rings while your hands are full. Here's what 90 days of real missed calls looked like.
Aug 12 – Nov 10, 2026. Test calls and spam removed. How we counted.
The problem
One tech, a bench full of laptops, and a phone that keeps ringing
A small repair shop gets its calls at the worst possible moments: halfway through a screen swap, mid data recovery, or with a customer already at the counter. Every ring that goes to voicemail is a person deciding whether to try the next shop on the list. And the evening and weekend calls used to go nowhere at all.
Here is how it's set up. The counter phone rings for about 15 seconds. If nobody picks up, Connie answers. After hours and on weekends, Connie answers every call. So every call counted on this page is one the shop would otherwise have missed.
What Connie did
Answered, sorted, and handed off
She answers in the shop's name. She handles the easy ones on the spot: hours, directions, the diagnostic fee, walk-in questions. When there's more to it, she takes the device, the problem and a callback number, then emails the shop a short summary within a minute. Robocalls and solicitors end there.
A typical after-hours call, paraphrased and anonymized
Sunday evening. A caller's desktop powers on, but the monitor gets no signal, even with the cables checked. Connie notes the machine and the symptom and takes a callback request. The shop has the summary waiting when it opens.
The real numbers
30, 60 and 90 days
All windows end Nov 10, 2026. Spam and the owner's own test calls are excluded from every row except the spam row.
| 30 days Oct 11 – Nov 10 | 60 days Sep 11 – Nov 10 | 90 days Aug 12 – Nov 10 | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Real calls answered | 60 | 96 | 150 |
| During business hours (counter busy) | 46 | 73 | 112 |
| After hours or weekend | 14 | 23 | 38 |
| Spam / robocalls screened out | 15 | 29 | 42 |
| Message taken for the shop | 29 | 50 | 76 |
| Question answered on the call | 25 | 38 | 63 |
| Callback requested | 3 | 5 | 8 |
| Transferred to a person | 2 | 2 | 2 |
| New-work leads | 12 | 25 | 44 |
| Calls about a device already in the shop | 25 | 35 | 46 |
| Median answer latency | 0.70 s | 0.73 s | 0.86 s |
| Average call length | 79 s | 74 s | 71 s |
| Calls from a number that had called before | 47% | 38% | 33% |
What people called about (90 days, all 150 real calls):
- Checking on a repair or a pickup: 46
- Laptop repairs (screens, hinges, batteries, charging): 18
- Hours, location and general questions: 16
- Asking for a person: 15
- Desktops that won't start, slow PCs, and other repair questions: 22
Jobs. The shop's own system links leads to repair tickets. Between Aug 26 and Oct 9, Connie leads turned into 21 repair tickets. At the shop's $60 diagnostic fee, that is a floor of about $1,260. It's a floor because we didn't add any repair value on top, and we haven't counted tickets since Oct 9 yet. Bookings are low on purpose: the shop is walk-in, so she takes details instead of filling a calendar.
90 days of tuning on real calls
How she got better
Faster replies
Smarter turn-taking cut the pause before she answers from 1.06 s in August to about 0.70 s from October on.
Promises you can keep
She promises a callback, never a clock time, so callers aren't told something your schedule can't deliver.
Knows your regulars
Before she speaks, she gets a short brief on who's calling, so returning customers aren't greeted like strangers.
Sounds more like a person
Tuned pacing, shorter replies, and natural ways of saying numbers and directions.
How we counted
Method and caveats
- Source: Connie's own call records for the shop, read-only, on Nov 10, 2026.
- Removed: every call from the owner's phone and any call marked as a test (3 in the 90 days). Spam is whatever the post-call classifier flagged as a robocall, silent call or solicitor.
- After hours: outside Mon–Fri 9–5 Eastern. The shop closed at 5:30 until Nov 6, so a few calls between 5:00 and 5:30 count as after hours here.
- New-work lead: a caller with new work (not a status check, a job seeker or a vendor) whose call ended with a message, callback request, booking or transfer.
- Answer latency: the gap between the caller finishing and Connie starting to speak, averaged per call. The table shows the median across calls.
- Returning callers: the number had called Connie before. We didn't check it against the shop's customer list, so it undercounts.
- Labels and topics: these come from AI call summaries and a keyword pass, not from a human reading every call.
- Downtime: Connie was offline Sep 19 – Oct 1, which lowers the 60- and 90-day totals.
- One shop: this is one trade at modest volume, about 60–95 calls a month. Your mix will differ.
- Privacy: no customer names, numbers or quotes appear here.
Want this on your missed calls?
Built for plumbers and home-service pros. 20 founding spots at $49/mo, and if she doesn't book you a job in 30 days, you don't pay.