Hard to say, easy to type: callers text your agent mid-call

Seventeen characters, read aloud over a road-noise phone line, is how a lot of service visits start. "J as in... A, four, A, T..." Somewhere around the ninth character a B becomes a D, and the visit is booked for a vehicle that doesn't exist.

People type these things better than they say them. So when an IDP voice agent needs a detail that's hard to say, it offers to text the caller, keeps the call open while they reply, and uses what they type.

What it looks like on a call

The caller says what they need. When the agent reaches a detail that's hard to say, it offers to text. On a yes, a short message goes out from your store's number ("Your Store: Reply with your VIN. It's 17 letters and numbers, on your registration or insurance card."), and the agent tells the caller it'll stay on the line.

When the reply arrives, the agent has it within the same call. It doesn't read the whole VIN back, which would put the problem back on the phone line. It confirms the last four, "ending three eight two six", and carries on.

If the text can't reach the caller, for example because they're calling from a landline, the agent hears that at once and asks for the detail on the call instead of waiting for a reply that will never come.

The check digit, and why it matters

Every VIN on a vehicle built for North America carries its own check. The ninth character is calculated from the other sixteen: each character gets a value, each position a weight, and the remainder after dividing the weighted sum by 11 has to match the ninth character (10 is written as X).

So a typo is caught before it reaches your scheduler or DMS. When a texted VIN doesn't check out, the agent tells the caller what's wrong and asks for it again rather than booking against it.

The same check applies when a caller insists on saying the VIN aloud. If what the agent heard doesn't check out, it reads it back in groups and asks which group is wrong. If the store already has a vehicle whose VIN ends the same way, it asks whether it's that one.

Or send a photo of it

A VIN is easy to find and tedious to type. So callers can simply reply with a photo of their registration card, insurance card or the plate on the dashboard.

The agent reads the VIN from the photo, runs the same check, and confirms the last four with the caller before using it. When a customer texts photos at other times, your texting agent now knows what they show, not just that photos arrived.

Not only VINs

The same move works for the other details that go wrong on the phone:

• License plates, read back once to confirm.
• Email addresses, where "dot" and "underscore" are easy to mishear.
• Street addresses, for pickup, delivery or a tow.

Each is read back once, so the caller can correct it while they're still on the line.

It remembers

A VIN the caller texts is saved with their vehicle, so it's there the next time they call. And when your store already has the caller's VIN on file, the agent confirms it with them ("Is this for the Eclipse Cross ending 3826?") instead of asking for it again.

On the record

Everything lands on the call's record. The moments list shows when the agent texted, how long it held, and when the reply arrived. The caller's text appears in the transcript as a text, not as something they said, so anyone reviewing the call sees exactly what happened.

What you set up

Nothing beyond what a voice agent already has: a number that can send texts, and the call flow where a VIN or plate is needed. Which details your agent asks for, and when, follows its instructions for each department.