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.

Sparviko started because I tried to buy one of these first. I booked a call with one of the AI answering companies to see what it could do. The guy 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 Protractor, the system my whole shop runs on? 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 it 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 hung up and thought to myself, I can make this. Then I went home and got to work. I knew exactly what a shop needs, because I run one.

But let me back up. To understand why I picked up that phone, you need to know what mornings here used to look like.

My advisors would walk in and spend 30+ minutes typing the overnight appointments from our website and the messages into our shop management system. If they were lucky they'd be caught up 30 minutes after opening, between the phone ringing and people walking in. You know how it is.

Then the phone rings all day. Sometimes literally all day. We'd miss calls and chase them down later. Cat and mouse with our own customers. The stress of it was insane.

So we built Brooke. Now she books most of the appointments. Web bookings go straight into our shop management system. People who call her to make an appointment, she puts in there too. The morning catch-up is gone. The advisors walk in and start selling work, not typing.

For the calls we don't grab ourselves, we trust now that she's going to. When we first built her, that was not the case. Took a few months. Six months in we have real confidence that the calls we don't answer get answered, and routed the right way. It took our regulars 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 would sure be nice to know who's calling and what they drive before we pick up. So we built a pop-out. The phone rings, a card pops on the screen showing who's on the line and what cars they own. (Has to be a customer of ours; we can't pop a stranger.) Tells us in a second whether to grab it or keep doing what we're doing.

Then I thought, the customer history lookup in our shop management system was rough. So we built one that isn't. 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 fall on the floor for us. We'd answer them, but it'd be months between us looking. I got tired of it. Now they get answered as they come in, in our voice. Anything serious comes straight to me.

How much time? 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. And our messages live on the same screen as the calls now, 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 at that.

Bill Rimmer Jr., Founder