"Your bike is ready" texts that answer the phone for you

In the middle of May, the phone rings every ten minutes and half the calls are the same question: is my bike ready. Every one of them pulls a mechanic off a stand or the counter person away from a customer standing in front of them. The customer is not being unreasonable. They just have no other way to know.

The fix is to tell them first. When a work order moves to ready for pickup, the customer gets a text saying so, with your hours and anything they need to bring. When a mechanic finds a worn cassette that was not on the original ticket, the customer gets an approval request instead of a voicemail. When a finished bike has been sitting on the hook for three days, the customer gets a reminder.

That is the design for customer updates in Service. It is on the roadmap and depends on things that are not in place yet: shop statuses on work orders, Service events reaching CRM, and CRM texting, which the rest of this page explains.

Service does not send texts itself. The Service plan is explicit that the conversations belong to erp.io CRM: Service owns the work, and CRM owns the customer, the message templates and the texting. When something happens to a work order, Service will write an event to an outbox, and CRM's workflow engine will decide what to send. The receiving end in CRM is not built yet.

That split is useful. The same CRM workflow builder that runs your follow-ups and review requests can run your bike-ready texts, with a delay, a condition or a different message for e-bike customers. Templates with variables such as the customer's name, the bike and the total due live in CRM, which is live today.

The texting itself runs through CRM's telephony. It is built but not sending yet: a dedicated number and 10DLC carrier registration have to be in place first, and carrier vetting takes weeks. Email updates through CRM work today. Text updates will not work until that registration is done.

The worst delay in a service department is the bike on the stand waiting for a yes. The customer dropped it off for a tune-up, the mechanic found a stretched chain and a cassette with shark-fin teeth, and now the bike sits until somebody gets the owner on the phone.

Half of this works today. The mechanic can write the chain and cassette onto a quote as optional lines, and when the customer says yes, the counter records it and the accepted lines flow into the job. What the plan adds is the delivery: the customer gets a link to approve by text or email. Approval can be recorded with a signature through erp.io Sign, which is live. The approved work flows back onto the work order and the bike goes back in the stand.

Good, better and best options work the same way: a basic chain replacement, a chain and cassette, or a full drivetrain with chainrings. The customer picks one from their phone. Tiers belong to repair quotes; quotes are live today with optional lines, and tiers are on the roadmap.

Some customers will call anyway. erp.io Phony, the AI receptionist, is live today and answers your shop line around the clock, takes messages and transfers calls to a person when needed. Phony call time is billed at $0.12 per minute on every plan.

Looking up a specific bike's status is something Phony will do once Service exposes work orders to it. Work orders are live in Service, but that lookup is part of the planned integration work and is not available yet, so today Phony can take the call but cannot read the ticket.

The goal is that by the time work orders, texting and the Phony lookup are all in place, the "is my bike ready" question mostly stops reaching your mechanics at all.