A 24-hour phone with one pair of hands
Bournemouth Airport Transfers covers airport runs to Bournemouth, Southampton, Heathrow and beyond, cruise transfers into Southampton's docks, and long-distance work across the south coast. Around 30 full-time drivers handle up to 30 jobs a day in the summer season, most of it pre-booked, and the husband and wife team behind it, Leah and Jon Iulisca, keep it running 24 hours a day.
The phone was the weak point. When the office is unmanned overnight, calls ring through at home at all hours. And in transfers, a missed call is a lost booking: if a caller does not get an answer first time, they simply ring the next company. With one person in the office during the day, the second and third calls arriving at once were exactly the ones slipping away.
She said she would never go down the AI route
Leah found Cyberstaff through an Instagram advert while waiting during her daughter's driving lesson. She was sceptical. She had always refused to hand her phones to an overseas call centre, her staff are worth their weight in gold, and AI was something she had sworn she would never touch.
So she tried to break it. She entered her website address, ran a test call and could not trip it up, and was amazed at how well it had picked up her business from the website alone. A member of her team tried next and came back with the same verdict. Her VoIP provider set up the call forwarding on the Monday, and by Tuesday morning the AI Receptionist, who Leah had named Charlotte, had taken bookings overnight without anyone lifting a finger.
Bookings by breakfast, calm by day
In its first five days, Charlotte answered 65 calls. Airport transfer bookings are not simple: flight numbers, pick-up points, hold and hand luggage, and return journeys with their own set of questions. Charlotte gathers the details, quotes from the company's own price list and drops a transcript and recording into the team's inbox moments later, so the callback is a confirmation, not an interrogation. Around 9 in 10 of the calls she handles turn into bookings, a step change from the voicemail callers used to reach and rarely used.
The change shows during the day, too. When the office line is busy, overflow calls are answered in parallel instead of beeping on call waiting. Overnight, out-of-scope calls, like late-night requests for local taxi work the firm does not do, are handled politely without waking anyone. When Jon came home late one evening that week to a still-ringing phone and asked if Leah was answering it, the reply summed the change up: no, Charlotte is on shift. The first night's bookings alone covered the monthly cost.
Trained on her own price list
Leah did the setup herself, from the car, and found the platform so user friendly it surprised her. She uploaded the company's PDF price list so quotes are always accurate, and added her own rules for bookings that need a human check: larger groups needing a multi-seater are told availability will be confirmed with a callback, and Charlotte is tailored to say a booking will be confirmed rather than confirming it outright.
She has also tweaked the greeting so callers know upfront they are speaking to an AI assistant, which most take in their stride. One caller told her it was the best he had ever heard. Whenever a call shows something worth improving, she adjusts the training and runs another test call. Each tweak takes minutes, and Charlotte gets a little sharper every day.