It's 11:40pm and a driver is standing on the shoulder of a dark two-lane highway, hazards blinking, watching headlights blow past a few feet away. She's already called two towing companies — one rang out, one gave her a vague "we'll try to get someone out there." You're the third number on her search results page, but you're mid-hookup on a dead battery call across town and can't grab your phone without dropping the strap. By the time you're free ten minutes later, she's already texted a fourth company and locked in their ETA instead. Here's what's safe to automate about that first call — intake, truck matching, and honest ETA texting — and what always has to stay with a real dispatcher.
Most towing calls aren't complicated — they're a location, a vehicle type, and "how long until someone gets here." None of that needs a driver to stop mid-hookup to answer. A system can take the call or text the moment it comes in, ask the same triage questions a dispatcher would, match the job to the right truck, and send a real ETA based on where your trucks actually are — then text updates as the driver gets close. What it can't do: make the judgment call on an unusual scene, a vehicle wedged somewhere a truck can't safely reach, or anything involving a collision or injury. Those always need a live dispatcher or driver on the phone.
Before anything else: when this guide says AI agent, it means a software system that looks at what's happening — an incoming call from a stranded driver, a text with a pin-dropped location, a web form asking "how much to tow my car" — figures out what the caller actually needs, and answers or routes it the way a good dispatcher would, without a driver having to pull over or set down a strap to pick up the phone. It doesn't decide how to hook a vehicle, and it doesn't judge whether a scene is safe to approach. It handles the answerable, logistical part of the call — location, vehicle type, ETA — so a driver or dispatcher can focus on the part that actually needs a person.
Towing has a structural problem most other trades don't: the moment a call comes in is almost always the moment your driver is least able to answer it. A tow that's actively hooking up a vehicle, winching something out of a ditch, or driving with a car on the hook isn't a safe moment to grab a ringing phone — and because most small towing operations run one or two trucks with no dedicated dispatcher, that means calls stack up during exactly the busiest, highest-value stretches of the day: rush hour, late-night bar close, and bad weather, when every truck is already out.
The stakes on the caller's end are higher than they look from your cab, too. A driver stopped on a live roadway shoulder is in a genuinely dangerous spot, not just an inconvenient one. Every state in the country now has a "Move Over" law requiring drivers to change lanes or slow down for vehicles stopped with hazard lights on, including tow trucks and the vehicles they're responding to1 — and the reason those laws exist on the books in all fifty states is that roadside work is dangerous enough to need them. The Towing and Recovery Association of America has put the toll in blunt terms: on average, a tow operator is killed every six days on America's roadways.2 That's not a stat about your driving — it's the reason a slow or vague response to "how long until you get here" isn't just a lost sale. It's more time a stranded vehicle and its occupants spend exposed on the shoulder than they need to be.
| What happens | Left alone | Automated first |
|---|---|---|
| Call comes in while a driver is mid-hookup | Rings out; caller tries the next company on the list | Answered instantly, location and vehicle type confirmed |
| "How long until someone gets here?" | Caller gets a guess, or no answer, and books elsewhere | Real ETA sent based on actual truck locations |
| "My car's wedged in a ditch off the shoulder" | (same either way — needs a driver's judgment, always) | Never automated — flagged unusual, routed to a live dispatcher |
| Truck gets close to the scene | Driver waits and wonders, calls back repeatedly | Automatic "5 minutes out" text sent without anyone typing it |
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Part of what makes towing intake harder than it looks is that not every job needs the same equipment. A wheel-lift truck — a smaller tow truck that lifts a vehicle by its front or rear wheels rather than carrying the whole car — is fine for a straightforward roadside tow, but a vehicle with all-wheel drive, significant damage, or low ground clearance usually needs a flatbed instead, where the whole car rides on a flat platform. Asking the right two or three questions at intake — is the vehicle drivable at all, what's the drive type, is it accessible from the road — is enough to route the job to a truck that can actually do it, instead of a driver arriving on scene and realizing they brought the wrong equipment, which costs the customer another 20-plus minutes waiting for the right truck to come back out.
Illustrative example, not a real client: say a two-truck towing operation fields around 70 calls a week between roadside breakdowns, dead batteries, lockouts, and impound-lot tows. If 8 of those calls a week come in while both trucks are already on a hook and go unanswered, and half of those callers dial the next number instead of waiting for a callback, that's roughly 16 tows a month — at a typical $125 average tow revenue — going to whoever answered faster. That's close to $2,000 a month, not from bad driving or bad pricing, but from a phone that was busy at exactly the wrong moment.
That's a fair worry, and towing is exactly the kind of moment where people want to feel like a real person has their back, fast. The honest answer is that a system like this should never pretend to be a human, and it should never leave someone standing on a shoulder wondering if help is actually coming. Picture a text a stranded driver might actually get, illustrative only, not a real transcript: "Hi, this is the automated line for Redline Towing — I want to be upfront about that. I've got your location and it looks like a standard roadside tow. Our next available truck is about 18 minutes out — I'll text you the second the driver's close. If this is more urgent than that, reply URGENT and I'll get a dispatcher on the phone with you right now." That's not replacing a person's judgment about an unusual or unsafe scene. It's making sure nobody's left standing on a shoulder with no idea whether anyone's coming.
This isn't a generic call-answering script — it's what Unmanually actually builds for an operation like yours: a system set up around your real truck locations, your real equipment mix, and clear rules for what gets routed straight to a live dispatcher — anything involving an unusual scene, a safety concern, or a customer who sounds unsure. The parts that need a person's judgment always stay with a person; the system only ever handles the answerable, logistics part of the call.
We also back this with a real guarantee, not a vague promise: try Unmanually for 60 days, and if it isn't saving your business real time, whatever's left of your prepaid balance converts to account credit. That's not a cash refund on usage you've already consumed, since that reflects real infrastructure cost already spent, but it does mean you're never stuck paying for a system that isn't earning its place.
For a towing company, the growth angle is direct: every call answered fast with a real ETA is a shot at a job you were already being asked to do. Every call that rings out during a busy stretch is one more job answered by whoever picked up first — and one more online review that mentions how fast (or slow) you were to respond. Catching more of those calls without hiring a full-time dispatcher is revenue you were already positioned to capture.
Not ready to commit to anything yet? That's completely fine — leave your email on our presale waitlist and we'll let you know as soon as dispatch-and-ETA answering for towing and roadside assistance companies is live, including founding-member presale pricing before it opens to everyone else this October.
1. National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, "Move Over: It's the Law," NHTSA (all 50 states require drivers to slow down or change lanes for stopped vehicles with hazard lights on, including tow trucks and roadside responders).
2. Towing and Recovery Association of America (TRAA), safety statistic cited in TRAA's public comments to the U.S. Federal Trade Commission (average of one tow operator killed every six days on U.S. roadways).
The full pillar guide this article belongs to.
Another trade where the busiest moment is exactly when it's hardest to answer the phone.
The same first-callback-wins-the-job dynamic in another emergency response trade.
More on the escalation pattern — where automation should stop, referenced above.
It can ask the same triage questions a dispatcher would to figure out roughly what's needed — is the vehicle drivable enough to roll on its wheels, is it all-wheel drive, is it in a spot a flatbed can actually reach — and use those answers to suggest the right truck and driver. It shouldn't make the final call on anything unusual: a vehicle wedged in a ditch, a multi-car scene, or damage that changes how it needs to be hooked. Those always need a driver's or dispatcher's judgment, either on the phone or in person.
Yes, as the first step, because getting accurate location and safety information fast matters more than a long conversation in that moment. The system's job is to confirm the caller is in a safe position, get the exact location and vehicle details, and get a truck moving or a live dispatcher on the phone immediately — not to talk someone through what to do at a live roadside scene. Any call involving injury, a collision still in progress, or a caller who sounds unsure of their own safety should route straight to a live person, not sit in an automated flow.
Take our free 2-minute readiness assessment — it walks through this same test against your actual call-answering and dispatch process and tells you honestly what to automate first.
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