Case study: what Dooley Timber's AI phone assistant actually does
Dooley Timber, a busy Irish timber merchant, put an AI phone assistant on its trade counter's phone line. Since launch it has handled 1,450 calls, missed none, and given the counter team back roughly 6 hours a week they used to spend answering the phone instead of the customer standing in front of them.
The problem it was solving
A trade counter phone rings constantly, and most of what it rings about is the same handful of questions: is this in stock, what's the price, what are your hours, where's my delivery. Every one of those calls pulled someone away from the customer actually standing at the counter — and the calls that landed early, late, or at lunchtime just went unanswered. Nobody was doing anything wrong. There simply wasn't a person free to catch every call on top of everything else the day already required.
What went in
No rip-and-replace. The assistant sits in front of the phone line Dooley Timber already had, tuned specifically on the questions this yard actually gets asked — not a generic script. Callers don't hit a menu or a "press 1 for sales." They just talk, and the assistant answers directly when it knows the answer: opening hours, stock and pricing questions, delivery and order status, standard lead times. Anything it can't answer, it takes a clear message for, and it hands real conversations — a negotiation, a complaint, anything that needs judgement — straight to the team rather than attempting them itself.
Getting it live didn't mean the counter team changed how they work. It was tuned against real questions before going live, and it took over answering the phone without anyone having to learn a new system to keep doing their own job.
What changed, in numbers
- 1,450 calls handled by the assistant since launch
- 0 missed calls in that time
- ~6 hours a week given back to the counter team
The number that matters most day to day isn't the call count — it's the zero. Every call used to be a choice between the phone and the person at the counter. Now that choice doesn't have to happen. The 7am calls from a site waiting on a delivery, the ones that used to ring out before anyone got to the desk, get answered too.
What it doesn't do
It doesn't negotiate, upsell, or close a sale — those calls get passed to a person instead. It doesn't handle a complicated complaint that needs real judgement, and it only knows what it's been told, so pricing and stock changes have to be kept current for the answers to stay accurate. It isn't a replacement for the team on a new enquiry that deserves a proper conversation — it's there to make sure the routine calls don't have to compete with that conversation for the same person's attention.
Could this work for your trade counter?
The pattern here isn't specific to timber. Any business whose phone rings all day with the same handful of questions — stock, price, hours, delivery — is a candidate for the same setup. If that's a phone ringing at your counter right now, see what it handles, what it doesn't, and what it costs on the AI phone assistant page.