Your front-desk hire matters more than almost anyone else in the shop. They book your jobs, control your customer experience, and run your daily ops. Here's the 14-day curriculum.
Day 1 — Orientation
Goal: get familiar with the shop, the team, and the role.
- Tour of the shop (bays, equipment, where everything lives)
- Meet every tech personally
- Read the company's mission + values doc (you have one, right?)
- Get login to SalesThumb + Slack + tools
- Customer-side walkthrough: book a fake quote, pay deposit, get reminders
- Shadow you for 2 hours of front-desk work
End-of-day check-in: questions? Concerns?
Day 2-3 — Quote system
Goal: build quotes confidently for the top 5 services.
- Walk through each service in the catalog
- Build a quote for each top-5 service from scratch
- Quote sequencing: vehicle → service → add-ons → deposit → send
- Review 10 real past quotes — what worked, what didn't
- Pricing rules: what discounts they can authorize, what needs manager approval
- Common questions customers ask + the right answers
End-of-day: build 5 practice quotes; you review.
Day 4-5 — Customer SMS + email
Goal: handle 80% of customer messages independently.
- Walk through the unified inbox
- Read 50 past customer SMS threads — see how the team replies
- Templates: when to use, when to write custom
- Voice + tone: warm, brief, helpful
- Common scenarios: reschedule request, deposit refund question, ETA question, complaint
- What to escalate to you (anything dispute-related, anything pricing-related, anything emotional)
End-of-day: reply to 20 real customer messages, you review.
Day 6-7 — Booking + scheduling
Goal: book jobs into the calendar correctly.
- Bay assignment rules
- Tech availability rules (shifts live on the Employees tab of the calendar)
- The shop's Buffer between bookings setting (Settings → Online Booking), and when to pad a service's duration on top of it — see Calendar conflicts
- Same-day vs advance booking
- Holiday + closed-day blocks
- Your reschedule and cancellation policy — a written shop policy, not a software setting
- Walk-in handling
Practice: 10 mock bookings (some with constraints — "tech A unavailable Wednesday", "bay 2 needs ceramic curing time", etc.)
End-of-day: handle real bookings; you review the day's calendar at end-of-shift.
Day 8-9 — Payment handling
Goal: process payments correctly, handle exceptions.
- Card checkout flow
- Deposit collection at booking
- Final payment at pickup
- Refunds + credits (what they can authorize, what needs you)
- Tip processing
- Chargebacks (escalate to you)
- Cash payments (if applicable)
Practice: process 5 real payments; you spot-check.
Day 10 — Daily ops + dashboards
Goal: own the day's flow.
- Morning routine: review the day's bookings, prep for first arrivals
- Throughout day: respond to inquiries, build quotes, send confirmations
- End of day: confirm tomorrow's bookings, close out the day's tickets
- Weekly: review last week's KPIs together (you walk them through it)
Day 11-12 — Edge cases
Goal: handle the 20% of cases that are hard.
- Customer wants something not in the catalog (custom quote workflow)
- Customer disputes a charge
- Customer cancels last-minute with a deposit
- No-show handling
- VIP customer treatment
- Difficult customer de-escalation
- Tech availability change mid-day
Role-play each scenario.
Day 13 — Solo morning
Goal: prove they can run the front for half a day.
- You're available but not at the front desk
- They handle every customer interaction, every quote, every booking
- End-of-shift debrief: what went well, what was hard
Day 14 — Solo full day + review
Goal: full solo shift.
- They run the front entirely
- You spot-check the calendar at end of day
- Review the week's KPIs together
- Discuss any patterns or improvements
- Set goals for next 30 days
After Day 14
They should be able to:
- Build any quote in <5 minutes
- Reply to any common customer question in <2 minutes
- Book any service correctly
- Process any payment cleanly
- Handle most edge cases independently
- Escalate appropriately
If not all of those, extend the training by another week and re-assess.
Watch for
- Quote accuracy — first 30 days, every quote should be reviewed by you before sending. Phase out review by day 14.
- Customer tone — listen to call recordings or read SMS exchanges weekly for the first month
- Escalation patterns — are they escalating too much (lack of confidence) or too little (over-confident)? Both have a fix.