mendbuddy - our own AI receptionist, on every channel a customer might use

A virtual receptionist we built first for our own device-repair business, then productised so any UK SME could have a version trained on their own pricing, voice, and policy. Web chat, WhatsApp, SMS, Facebook Messenger, Instagram Direct, and inbound voice calls - all answered by one trained agent, with a dashboard the owner uses to see what got handled, what got escalated, and which leads came in.

Live: mendbuddy.com

The brief

mendbuddy started inside mendmyi, the studio’s device-repair business. Every Tuesday between 10am and 2pm the bench was full - eight phones being lifted, glued, calibrated - and the inbound was also full: “how much to fix an iPhone 15 screen”, “is it cheaper to repair or buy back”, “do you do iPad batteries”, “I’ve sent a quote enquiry on the website, has it come through”. Three of those four questions are answerable from a price list. The fourth is the genuine diagnosis that needs a human. The technician on the bench was answering all four badly, because his gloves were on and his hands were inside a phone. The voicemail full of “sorry, found someone else” in the evening was the cost.

The off-the-shelf chatbots were the wrong shape. A widget that says “I can’t help with that, please ring during business hours” makes the missed-call problem worse. A generic LLM trained on the open web invents prices, invents policies, and quotes on jobs it doesn’t understand. What we needed was an agent trained on our own pricing, our own diagnosis tree, our own scope-of-service, that could pick up on every channel a customer might use - and escalate, fast, when the situation genuinely needed a human. Once the shape was working at mendmyi, the same shape turned out to be what every reactive-trade business, every hospitality operator, every clinic with phones ringing wanted. So we productised it.

What it actually does

Picks up across six channels. Web chat on any site, WhatsApp Business, SMS, Facebook Messenger, Instagram Direct, and inbound voice calls. The same agent, same trained knowledge, same voice. The customer dials the same number they always have, DMs the same Instagram they always have, hits the chat widget on the same site - they don’t learn anything new.

Trained on you, not the open web. You upload your own documents (your price list, your FAQ, your terms, your scope-of-service rules). You can point it at the pages of your existing website that already describe what you do, and it pulls that in too. There’s a simple form for the bits that aren’t in a document - opening hours, the services you do and don’t offer, the things that always need to escalate to a human. From there on, the agent answers from your business. Updates work the way you’d update a team handbook: change the source, push, and tomorrow it knows what it didn’t know today.

Customisable in every direction. The tone - direct or warm, plumber-blunt or funeral-director-gentle. The voice on the phone - accent, pace, opening line. The web-chat branding - your colours, your logo, your wording. Business hours per channel. Escalation rules that are tuned to your operational reality. Even the underlying AI model is per-workspace selectable so the cost / quality / latency trade-off can be tuned to your traffic shape.

The dashboard. The business owner sees every conversation across every channel as a single searchable thread per customer - full transcript, source channel, lead status, captured details (name, postcode, what they wanted). New messages light up in real time so you can step in on the £4,800 quote and reply yourself; the agent pauses on that thread until you hand it back. Multiple team members get the access level they need - front-of-house can see threads, the owner can change the prompt, etc. Conversation analytics show what the agent handled, what it escalated, and where leads came from.

A native iOS app for the same dashboard. The business owner runs the receptionist from their phone - see new conversations, jump in on any thread, take a voice call back from the agent. For verticals where customers come back regularly, the same app can be branded under your name as the customer-facing channel.

Booking, quoting, lead capture - not just chat. The agent doesn’t just talk. It generates quote bands from your price list, books appointment slots, captures contact details + symptom + postcode, and pings a one-line summary to your phone so the follow-up - by you or by the agent - picks up where the conversation left off.

The outcome

At mendmyi, the bench-overrun Tuesdays stopped costing voicemails-full-of-sorry. The agent handles the price-list questions, the “do you do iPad batteries” enquiries, and the “has my quote come through” chases without lifting a technician off a bench. The genuine diagnoses still escalate - that’s the whole point - but they escalate with the customer’s name, postcode, device model, and symptom captured first, so the call-back lands prepared.

As a productised platform, mendbuddy now runs across reactive trades, accountants doing records-chase, funeral directors doing 3am first-call triage, lettings agents doing portal-enquiry speed-to-lead, and wedding venues doing the sub-15-minute first-DM reply. Each workspace ships with its own training data, its own voice tone, its own escalation matrix, and its own channel set. The platform shape stays constant; the training is yours.

Which verticals this fits

The broadest-applicability case study in the catalogue - any business with substantial inbound across text or voice channels. Three buyer modes:

Reactive trades

• Plumbers
• Electricians
• Gas engineers
• Roofers
• Locksmiths
• Builders
• Decorators
• Landscapers
• MCS installers

Regulated and professional services

• Accountants
• Solicitors
• Clinics
• Domiciliary care
• Recruiters and HR
• Construction
• Lettings
• Professional services
• Charities

Local and specialist businesses

• Hospitality
• Gym & fitness
• Device repair
• Independent garages
• Pet services
• Holiday lets
• Funeral directors
• Self-storage
• Wedding suppliers
• Driving instructors
• Tutors and nurseries
• Equine yards
• Agriculture

Which problems this solves

mendbuddy is the live example for the platform-shaped solutions and the customer-cadence solutions that need a multi-channel transport layer:

• Trainable Inbound AI Agentthe AI receptionist itself
• Multi Channel Comms Threadone searchable thread per customer across every channel
• Quote & Chase Laddermulti-channel transport for the quote follow-up
• Booking & Review Loopappointment confirmation + review request on the right channel
• Recurring Service Recallrecall cadence on the channel the customer prefers
• Grant & Submission Handlingcustomer-side status updates on submitted grants
• Client Onboarding & Intakeconversational intake capture

Want one like mendbuddy for your business?

Tell us what your inbound looks like - what channels it lands on, what fraction of it is answerable from a price list or FAQ, what fraction genuinely needs you, what it’s currently costing you when nobody picks up. We’ll come back with a sketch of what we’d train, what we’d wire, and what the build would look like for your shape of business. No demo to sit through, no calendar widget, no live-chat-with-sales loop - email reply, scoped sketch, you decide.