I tried to buy one first.

I've worked on cars for over 40 years and run Cooper Lake Automotive in Smyrna for 30 of them.

I founded Sparviko out of frustration. I knew my service advisors needed help, so I booked a call with one of the AI answering companies to see what AI could do. The salesman on the call couldn't answer my questions. Every time I asked something specific, he stopped and texted somebody in the background to get the answer.

I asked the simple stuff. "Can it book an appointment straight into my shop management system?" "Can it know who's calling before my advisor picks up?" "Can it tell a customer when their last oil change was?" He couldn't tell me what the AI did inside Protractor at all. Everything I actually wanted, the things that would make it useful in a real shop, he said would be custom and cost extra.

I ended the call and thought to myself, I can make this. Then I went home and got to work. I know exactly what a shop needs, because I run one.

Let me back up and give you a little bit of insight as to why I booked that sales call in the first place. You need to know what mornings at my shop used to look like, before Brooke and Sparviko existed.

My advisors would clock in and spend 30+ minutes entering in the data from the overnight appointment requests and drop offs. After that, they would have to go through the voicemails and call customers back to confirm and/or reschedule appointments. If they were lucky, they'd be caught up 45 minutes to an hour after opening. However, with customers walking in and the phone ringing off the hook, that virtually never happened.

The phone rings all day. We'd miss calls and chase them down later. It was a cat and mouse game with our own customers. The stress of it was insane.

So, we built Brooke. Now, she books the majority of the appointments. Web bookings go straight into our shop management system. She books the appointments by phone as well. The morning catch-up is gone. The advisors walk in and start selling work, not entering data. Brooke is on call 24/7 so my advisors don't have to be.

For the calls that my service advisors can't catch, I know that Brooke has their back. It took a few months for my advisors to trust that but now they have real confidence that the calls still get answered, and routed the correct way. It took our regular customers a minute to get used to her too. Now they ask her things like "when was my last oil change?" and she tells them. She'll then offer to book an appointment for the next one.

Then I thought, it sure would be nice to know who's calling and what they drive before we pick up the phone. So we built the pop-out box. The phone rings, a box pops on the screen showing who's on the line and what cars they own. (The customer must be in our database. Otherwise, it shows "unknown caller.") This expedites the call when the advisor picks up the phone. They can already have the customer's ticket pulled up and be ready to discuss.

The customer history lookup in our shop management system was rough. So we built one that is user friendly. Type a phone number or a VIN. See every car the customer owns and every dollar they've spent. Click a car and filter by what you want to know. When the last cabin air filter went in. When the CEL was pulled. Whatever you need.

Google reviews used to be a mountain for us to climb. We'd answer them, but it'd be one of the last things on our long list of things to do. Now, Brooke answers them as they come in. Nothing piles up and anything serious gets answered by the shop manager personally.

How much time is saved? The industry says the average phone call is 4 minutes. I think it's longer than that, but okay, let's roll with 4. At that number, Brooke saves us 23.1 hours a month. Think about what that is across a year. Our messages now live on the same screen as the calls, so I can read what was said or play the audio in one click. That's truly a game changer.

The sole purpose of Sparviko is to give your advisor their time back so they can do what they're actually good at, which is sitting with the customer and selling the repair. Everything we've built points to that.

Bill Rimmer Jr., Founder