Phony: an AI that picks up the shop phone

Phony is the erp.io module for conversations: website visitor intelligence, AI chat, AI voice on the web and on the phone, and warm handoff to a person. For a bike shop it does two jobs. The first is the receptionist: the phone rings on a Saturday in May, nobody at the counter is free, and Phony answers. The second is the sales developer: somebody from a local employer is reading your fleet service page for the third time this week, and Phony notices, starts the conversation and gets the lead to you.

It is one agent, not six. Chat on your site, voice in the browser, inbound calls, outbound follow-up calls and texting all run from the same knowledge and the same rules, so the agent does not describe your shop one way on the phone and another way in chat. You write down your hours, your labor rates, what a standard tune-up includes, how long wheel builds take and what you do not work on, and that is what it answers from.

Every conversation ends with a recorded outcome: qualified, booked, callback, escalated, not a fit, opted out, and so on. That outcome is what the reports run on, and it is written to describe what actually happened, not what the agent hoped for.

You set who answers first. During opening hours you can have the AI answer first, ring the counter first, or leave it to the AI alone. After hours you choose AI only, voicemail or a text back. You must also choose a fallback, and there is no option for "nothing": Phony will not let you save a set-up in which a caller ends up listening to silence. You set how long the counter phone rings before Phony steps in, and up to five numbers to try in order.

When a rider calls, Phony answers from your knowledge base. It can tell them your hours, what a safety check covers, whether you service a given motor system if you have written that down, and roughly what a job costs if you publish prices. When the caller needs a person, it hands over with a summary, so the mechanic who picks up does not start from "sorry, who is this?". When nobody is free it books a real callback for a window the caller chose, and Phony places that call when the time comes. If it cannot answer twice, or the caller is upset, or money is being discussed concretely, it escalates.

Here is the honest part. Phony cannot yet look up a repair and say "your bike is ready". Service work orders are live, but there is no link from Phony into them yet, and Service has no bike record to match a caller to. Today it takes the caller name and number, notes the bike, and either transfers them to the counter or books the callback. The Service plan has Phony calling Service availability and booking, and Service publishing an API and agent tools. Once that link is built, it is what lets Phony answer "is my bike ready?" from the repair itself, and book a drop-off slot once online booking exists.

Most shop revenue walks in the door. The accounts that change a year usually do not: a delivery company with forty e-bikes, a campus bike share, a corporate wellness program, a hotel with a rental fleet. Those buyers research quietly, and they rarely call first.

Phony identifies the companies visiting your site where it can, enriches the visit into a person or company, and scores intent from what they look at. When someone from a real business keeps coming back to your fleet page, the chat can open with a line written for that visit, and Auto connect can offer a call while they are still on the page when the score is high enough. Whatever they leave, a name, an email or a phone number, goes to the people you chose and into the CRM.

Outbound calling is held to consent. Phony follow-up calls run only where consent allows them, and the strongest case is the callback someone asked for. If someone asks not to be contacted, on any channel, Phony records the opt-out and stops. For list-based outreach to fleet buyers by email and LinkedIn, the Marketing module has an Outbound Engine that feeds the same CRM.