A studio of one can’t answer every call
D-S-Design Studio is an independent web and graphic design studio in Shaftesbury, Dorset, and Daniel Sherlock runs it on his own while also working another job. The studio takes 10 to 15 calls a week, and no two are alike: new enquiries who have just found him on Google, branding projects, existing clients who need support, a client whose live website has gone down, meeting requests, invoices and account queries, plus the sales calls he would rather not take.
When you are the whole team, you physically can’t be available all the time. Too often a caller’s first contact with the studio was Daniel’s voicemail, and he heard about it. For a business built on first impressions, that was the wrong one.
Why he chose Cyberstaff
Daniel found Cyberstaff on Instagram while searching for an AI answer to his phone problem. It was only the second service he looked at properly, and setup felt easy rather than complicated. He admits he was hesitant at first, so it helped that he could ask the Cyberstaff team to look over his setup and check it would do what he wanted.
Then he put it through its paces. Friends and family rang in pretending to be every kind of customer, deliberately trying to catch it out, including with some completely ridiculous questions. It kept coming back with clever answers, and that testing gave Daniel the confidence to put the number in front of his own clients.
Every caller gets the right process
Advanced call handling is what makes it work for a studio with so many different reasons to call. The AI Receptionist works out why someone is ringing and follows the right process. A client whose live website has gone down is recognised as urgent and put straight through to Daniel. A general enquiry gets real answers about his services, which it learned from his website, and it even talks confidently about Webflow, the platform he mainly builds on, without boxing him into only working with it. A meeting request gets the caller’s availability collected, ready for Daniel to confirm himself.
That last part matters to him. Appointments, pricing and every important decision still come down to Daniel. Nothing has been booked by accident and no promises have been made on his behalf. It answers both a new local landline, which he can advertise for the business, and his existing mobile, so long-standing clients have not had to change how they reach him. Each call arrives as an email with the caller’s details and quick options to ring or email them back.
A new client from a call he couldn’t take
In roughly his first month, two or three new clients came in through calls the AI Receptionist handled while Daniel was at his other job, more than he would normally win. One had found him on Google, had a good five-minute conversation with the AI Receptionist, and got a call back from Daniel the moment he was home. It turned into a sizeable new website project. She knew she was speaking to AI, and still came away feeling heard.
It lands with older clients too. Some of Daniel’s customers are wary of AI, yet even they find the calls natural and normal. His advice to other owners is simple: it is a bit of a leap of faith, but the more you put into it, the more you get out, and it is worth doing.
Rated Excellent on Trustpilot