Shopmonkey rebuilt support from the ground up—and Dialpad made every call count

When a technician at an auto repair shop has a question, they're usually standing at the counter with a customer in front of them, or elbow-deep in an engine bay. They're not going to wait. If they can't get someone on the phone quickly, they'll hang up and figure it out themselves—or worse, leave a negative review, miss a sale, or churn.

That's the reality facing Shopmonkey, the cloud-based shop management platform built for auto repair businesses. Shopmonkey handles everything from digital estimates and parts tracking to invoicing and customer communications for thousands of shops across the country. When their customers have a problem, speed and reliability aren't nice-to-haves. They're the whole game.

Steve Hart joined Shopmonkey as Director of Support with a clear mandate: rebuild the support operation. What he inherited was a team with good intentions but limited tools—and a voice channel that was quietly failing its customers.

The Challenge: A phone system that was losing calls nobody knew about

Before Dialpad, Shopmonkey's support team ran everything through Intercom—voice, chat, and email—all funneled into a single platform known more for in-app chat than contact center capabilities.

The problems weren't always obvious. Customers would reach out saying they'd tried to call and never got through. Calls would fail to route. Voicemails disappeared. And critically, there was no visibility into what was actually happening. When a call didn't connect, there was no way to see which IVR option was pressed, where in the flow it dropped, or whether the customer ever got to a human.

"There was no way to look up a phone number, see when they called, which IVR path they took, or where the call ended up," Steve recalls. "We just knew calls weren't getting through."

At the same time, the voice and non-voice queues were siloed—a handful of agents handled only phone, others only chat and email. During peak times, phone agents were overwhelmed while chat agents sat idle. During slower windows, the reverse happened. Customers calling in got transferred mid-conversation when they needed a callback. The experience was disjointed, and support was showing up in churn data.

When Steve came in with experience building contact centers and a deep familiarity with what modern call center platforms could do, the gaps became impossible to ignore. It was time to make a change.

Why Dialpad: Reliability, visibility, and self-sufficiency

Shopmonkey already had Dialpad in place for its sales and commercial teams when Steve arrived. His decision to migrate the support team to Dialpad wasn't complicated—it was about solving for the things that mattered most.

• Reliability: Intercom's voice product wasn't built for call center operations. Dialpad was. The IVR was flexible, the routing was configurable, and calls actually connected.

• Visibility: With Dialpad, Steve was able to pull up any phone number and see the full call history—every interaction, every IVR path, and every outcome. For an escalation or a repeat caller, that context is everything.

• Operational control: Perhaps most importantly, Steve could manage the platform himself. No tickets to IT. No waiting on a vendor. When something needed to change, he could change it.

The first week told the whole story

The impact showed up immediately—in the best possible way.

"The first week we went live on Dialpad, our phone volume increased about 30–40% from what it was on Intercom," Steve says. "And my first thought was: were that many calls just not getting through before?"

They were. The jump wasn't new demand—it was suppressed demand suddenly freed. Customers who had tried and failed to reach Shopmonkey support now had a phone channel that actually worked.

Restructuring for speed: One queue, every agent

Once the infrastructure was solid, Steve tackled the next problem: utilization. The siloed agent model meant coverage was always uneven.

The year before, he’d made a structural change: every Tier 1 agent became available across all channels—phone, chat, email, and web tickets—simultaneously.

The result was a consistent speed-to-answer that Steve has maintained from that point on. "Since we made that change, our average speed to answer has been under 30 seconds every single week. We just pulled April's numbers—our average was 20 seconds."

For Shopmonkey's customers—technicians, front-counter staff, and shop owners—that's not just a metric. It's the difference between getting help and hanging up.

QA that actually scales: AI Scorecards in action

As the team stabilized, Steve turned his attention to quality. He launched a formal QA program in the fall—but the early process was entirely manual. Supervisors listened to calls, rated agents on a 1–5 scale in a Google Sheet, and fed back results by hand. It was time-consuming, inconsistent, and generated more debates than improvements.

"With a 1-5 scale, you'd get pushback like 'you gave me a three, I kinda did the thing.' It was subjective," Steve explains. "We needed something cleaner."

Prior to that, Shopmonkey converted their AI CSAT licenses to AI Scorecards in Dialpad. The results have been significant.

Rather than a 1–5 scale, scorecards use yes/no questions tied directly to call behavior:

Did the agent confirm the account?
Did they take ownership?
Did they close properly?

The structure removes subjectivity. The AI surfaces recommendations. A human reviewer makes the final call—but with the AI doing the heavy lifting, that reviewer can now score four times as many calls per session as they could manually.

"Having the scorecard right there in the platform, tied to the call, emailed to the agent at the end of the interaction—it's just that much more seamless," Steve says.

The outcomes speak for themselves. When the QA program launched, the team was scoring in the low 80s on average. Today they're at 92%.

Self-sufficiency as a competitive advantage

One of the less obvious—but deeply felt—benefits of Dialpad for Steve has been the ability to move fast without dependencies.

Recently, Shopmonkey's small payments team was getting overwhelmed by call volume it couldn't always handle. Support agents were picking up those calls, realizing they couldn't help, and putting customers on hold to find someone who could, resulting in a frustrating experience all around.

Steve's fix took 15 minutes.

He rebuilt the payments IVR from scratch—routing a subset of payment inquiries to the support team, sending the rest directly to the payments team, and eliminating the dead-end handoffs entirely. No ticket. No IT call. No waiting.

"Small changes that before would have required calling somebody—can now be done on the fly," he says.

What's next

Steve is clear-eyed about where Dialpad fits into Shopmonkey's future—and where it doesn't yet.

The support team's customers are auto shop technicians and shop owners. They're not looking to interact with AI. They want a person on the phone, fast. That's why the phone channel remains the priority, and why maintaining a sub-30-second average answer time is non-negotiable.

But Steve is actively watching the roadmap for Agentic AI in the voice channel—not to replace agents, but to route smarter. "Right now, customers choose an IVR option based on where they think they should go—but that's not always where they actually need to go," he explains. "When we get to the point where AI can route based on the topic of the conversation, not just what the customer pressed—that's going to be a real unlock."

In the meantime, he's focused on Custom Moments, getting more signal from every interaction, better tagging of call reasons, and deeper reporting to share with the engineering team about why customers are calling in the first place.

The support team that once showed up as a churn reason now shows up in win stories. A third-party consultant brought in to assess customer sentiment found one phrase that stuck with Steve: "The rebuilt support team is delivering."

What Steve would tell other support leaders

"Be methodical in your approach— but don't add AI just for the sake of saying you do AI. Really act on what's in the best interest of your customers. For us, that means keeping the phone answered in under 30 seconds. That's what our customers want, and that's what drives the scores and the sentiment we're proud of."

Steve Hart, Director of Support, Shopmonkey.io

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