How do three tuners share one queue and never answer a customer twice?

Picture a file service of three. The owner tunes petrol and runs the business. A second tuner does the diesels and works mornings. A third, paid by the file, covers the evenings from home. For two years they have shared one login and one group chat, and the group chat decides everything: who takes the van that just came in, who answered the man with the gearbox question, whether anybody has told the dealer his file is late.

It works until the day it does not. A customer writes at six in the evening and gets two different answers, ten minutes apart, from two tuners who did not see each other typing. Another writes at lunch and gets none, because each tuner thought the other had it. Nothing was wrong with the tuning. The shop simply had no rule for who does what.

This is the walk that shop takes through four parts of its portal: the request queue, the team, Messages with its phone app, and the notices. Each links to the page that describes it in full.

Which job comes first, and who says so?

The first argument in the group chat was always the order. The request queue settles it with a rule the whole team can read. A job where the customer spoke last and nobody has answered comes first. Then a file whose opening or packing failed. Then the tier the customer paid for: urgent ahead of express ahead of normal. Within each of those, whatever moved last.

So the evening tuner no longer asks what to do next. They press Next job, or take the row at the top, and the row is there for a reason they can see. Oldest first, newest first and by price are still there for the days the owner wants them.

Express and urgent jobs run against a clock the owner sets once: Express turnaround and Urgent turnaround. Each such job shows on the board as on track, at risk or missed. The board shows it and does nothing more: a missed time does not give anything back to the customer by itself. What it does is end the conversation that used to start with "did anyone see the urgent one?"

How does a job get a tuner's name on it?

In the old shop the owner read each new request and wrote a name in the chat. On a busy day that was the bottleneck: the upload came in at nine, the owner looked at eleven, and the tuner started at half past.

The portal can hand the jobs out itself. Automatic job assignment keeps a pool of the people who may take work, and How jobs are shared out is the rule that picks from it. There are five choices:

Our shop starts with In turn, as the page advises, and assigns by hand for a week to see whether the rule would have chosen the same. Then it fills in the skills, petrol for one tuner and diesel for another, and moves to By skill: a diesel read goes to the diesel tuner as it arrives. Once the evening tuner's hours are in, Skill and availability is the rule that fits three people on different shifts.

The last switch is Assign new jobs on arrival. On, every new request is handed out the instant the customer sends it, so the tuner is told at the same moment as the owner. A request still waiting for its payment is skipped at that moment, so no unpaid job lands on a tuner.

When the rule finds nobody, the job stays unassigned, for the owner. That is where Technicians pick their own jobs helps: technicians see the jobs nobody has yet, and one of them takes a job by accepting it. Two who accept the same job at the same moment cannot both get it. The first wins and the other is told. The handing out by rule and the picking come with Pro and above, because they only mean something once there is more than one person to share the work.

What should each tuner see?

The shared login had a second cost the shop never counted: the evening tuner, a freelancer, could read every customer's email and phone number, every price and every invoice. Nobody decided that. It was just how one login works.

On the portal each person has an account of their own, with a role. The team page describes the six rules for the technician role, and three of them matter on the first day.

• Hide customers from technicians means no technician sees who buys a file: not the name, the email, the phone, the company or the address. A new portal starts that way.
• Technicians see the customer as decides what stands where the name would be: the car on the job, a customer number or the initials. The car is right for most shops. Our shop has a dealer who sends five vans of the same model in a day, so it chooses the number, and the tuner sees that all five belong together.
• Any technician covers any job lets whoever is on shift reply and deliver on every request, not only their own. A technician who delivers on a job that was somebody else's is noted as having taken it over.

That third one is the answer to the customer who writes at six. The diesel tuner went home at four. The evening tuner opens the job, answers and delivers the revision, and the record says who did it. The page is careful about the edges: price, assigning and removing a job stay with the owner and the administrators in every case, and giving credits back stays with the office unless its own switch opens it.

There is a fourth rule for the day the shop takes on a trainee: Technicians see only their jobs. It has a consequence worth knowing before you switch it on. A technician limited to their own jobs cannot take open jobs, so somebody has to assign each one. And the rules apply to the technician role as a whole, not to each person.

How does a customer get one answer, not two?

This was the fault that started it all. In Messages, every conversation lands in one list, sorted by who is waiting on the shop: the chat on every job, the website chat once a visitor needs a person, the support tickets and the team's own private messages. A customer who writes lands under Needs you.

Then one person takes it. The others see who has it, at once, and they stop. The tuner who took it answers with the car, the ECU, the files and the fault codes beside the reply, so nobody opens a second window to remember which car this was. Mark as done closes it, and the whole conversation stays with the job.

On the job itself there is a matching habit: lock it if a colleague might open the same file. Two tuners do not then tune the same read.

And the customer who used to get no answer at all? The portal keeps a clock on every customer waiting. Past the minutes the owner sets, staff get a first reminder, then a second shown as urgent. There is a last step, a reminder that covers the whole screen of every member of staff signed in until someone answers. It stops every page, so it is off until the owner decides a customer must never wait that long.

The group chat does not vanish; it moves. Private messages between staff lets the three write to each other inside the portal: a question about a file, a hand-over, a note that the customer rang.

What rings on whose phone?

The evening tuner is not at a desk. Messages also lives on the team's phones as an app of its own: the owner, the admins and the tuners install it from the Messages page, it carries the shop's name and icon, and it opens straight on the conversations.

The rule that matters is Ring again until somebody takes it. A conversation nobody has taken rings the team's phones again until somebody takes it, answers it or gives it back to the assistant, and it stops for everyone when one person does. That single behaviour is the cure for "I thought you had it". The owner chooses how often it repeats, whether the repeats happen only in opening hours, and when it gives up. Each person can still turn the ringing off for themselves, so the tuner on holiday sleeps.

The app is installed from the browser, not from an app store, and today it is for the team, not for customers.

Who is told about what?

Three people do not all need every notice. The notifications page holds two choices that shape a team's day: Who hears about a new job and Who hears about a new message. They decide who is interrupted, not who can see. The queue still shows every open job to everyone who may work it, and anybody who may work a job can still open it and step in.

The advice on that page suits a shop of three: leave every way on at first, email, the bell, sound, push and Telegram. When one kind of notice annoys, open the notification channels page and switch off that one way for that one kind. After a week, ask the team what they ignore. Tuners who live in the portal can be spared notice emails with Roles that get no notice emails, and they still get what a person must get, such as a sign-in code.

Sounds are worth a minute too. Jobs, payments, people, problems and support chats each have their own note, so the diesel tuner knows without looking up whether that was a new read or a customer writing. Sounds need an open portal page. For a closed browser, the phone app, push or Telegram does the work.

What happens when a customer writes on a finished job?

A job that is delivered leaves the queue for the Request History. If the customer asks for a change, the job returns to the active work, flagged as waiting for a reply. If they only write, it depends on Reopen finished jobs on reply: the number of days after a job finished in which a customer's message puts it back into the queue. At zero, the message waits in Messages instead.

The page is plain about the trade. The portal cannot tell a thank-you from a complaint, and any message inside the window brings the job back. A team that lives in the queue and rarely opens Messages sets a couple of days. Our shop, with the phone app ringing for every conversation, leaves it at zero.

What does the shop still decide by hand?

Some things stay with people, and it is better to know them now.

• The queue orders the work. It does not do it.
• A job the rule could not place waits for the owner or for a tuner to take it.
• The technician rules are one set for the role. Only the commission rate is set on a person's own row.
• When a tuner leaves, the owner suspends the account on Users. Their jobs, files and history stay where they are.

By the end of the first week the group chat has gone quiet, which is the result the shop wanted. The order is the queue's, the name on each job is the rule's, and each conversation belongs to the one person who took it.