AI answering service for appliance repair

The model plate is worth more than the description

A visit succeeds or fails on whether the part is already on the van. Someone saying “the fridge stopped working” tells you nothing; someone reading eleven characters off a sticker inside the door tells you what to bring. Extracting those characters is a two-minute conversation nobody has time for when the phone rings mid-service.

handlo has that conversation on every call. It asks for the brand, walks the caller to where the label usually sits on that type of appliance, reads the string back to confirm it, and attaches it to the job with the symptom and the address.

What repair businesses ask

• “Half of it will still be wrong.” Some will, and it is recorded as reported rather than confirmed. A partial model string still narrows a parts order more than nothing does.
• “I only work on certain brands.” Name them and the rest are captured politely without booking a visit you would have cancelled anyway.
• “Warranty jobs come through a different route.” Any call where a warranty or a home-cover plan is mentioned is flagged, so it is not booked as private work by mistake.
• “Some of these are not worth fixing.” It does not make that call. It captures the age of the appliance so that you can, before anybody drives anywhere.

What it stays away from

• No diagnosis. It will not name a failed component or tell somebody the compressor has gone.
• No repair-or-replace advice, and no estimate for a machine it cannot see.
• No troubleshooting steps beyond telling a caller to unplug something that is leaking or smells hot.

What arrives before you drive

The intake is written for somebody loading a van at seven in the morning, not for a database.

• Appliance type, brand, the model string as read, the symptom and the address arrive as separate fields.
• Spoiling food and active leaks are flagged and page you; a noisy dryer queues.
• The service windows the caller can genuinely do are captured, so a first attempt is not a wasted trip.

The second visit you should never have needed

Almost every wasted return trip traces back to something the first phone call did not think to ask, and all of it is answerable by somebody standing in their own kitchen.

• Whether the machine is integrated or freestanding — one of those needs a second pair of hands and a longer slot.
• Where it sits: a basement, a third floor with no lift, or built into a counter run that has to come apart first.
• Whether the fault is constant or intermittent, and what the caller was doing when it started.
• Whether the appliance has been worked on before, and by whom, because a previous repair changes what you expect to find.