The seven in the morning problem
DNGR Tech is an IT and computer repair business covering homes and small businesses across Hampshire and West Sussex. Roughly four in five jobs are consumer work: a screen gone black, a machine that will not boot, a failed drive. The rest is small business support, mostly Microsoft 365 and website work, held on ongoing contracts. Oakley is now moving into selling hardware too, so a customer can buy the machine, have it maintained, and come back for the next one.
The business takes 20 to 30 calls a week and Oakley works nights, which means the phone rings hardest at the time he is least able to answer it. Calls at 7am were missed almost every time. Voicemail did not rescue them either. Most callers never left one, and the ones who did left almost nothing worth acting on, so every missed call turned into either a lost customer or a game of phone tag.
Why he chose Cyberstaff
Oakley found Cyberstaff through a social media advert and went in expecting an AI Receptionist to be more expensive and more complicated than it turned out to be. He had assumed something over £100 a month, in line with the other AI subscriptions he was paying for. It came in significantly cheaper than that, and on the Growth (middle) tier he rates it as excellent value.
Setup was quick. The website scan pulled the business details in rather than making him copy and paste them, and he had it answering calls in under ten minutes. He then spent less than an hour working through the settings one at a time, going through absolutely everything to decide how each part should behave. Which questions it asks and in what order, what details it captures, how far it goes on timings. That is the difference between an AI Receptionist that answers the phone and one that answers it the way he would.
The heavy lifting happens before he calls back
Calls ring Oakley for 20 to 30 seconds first. If he does not pick up, they divert to the AI Receptionist, which answers, asks his questions and emails the summary through. Between 40 and 60% of incoming calls go this route, weighted heavily towards the morning.
The questions are his. Type of machine or type of job, make and model, whether it is a home or a business caller, and a rough timeframe rather than a fixed slot, because a promised 2pm he cannot make is worse than no time at all. A caller saying “Monday afternoon-ish” is enough for him to plan around. That removes five minutes of basic questioning from every call, which across 20 to 30 calls a week adds up to hours. It also picks up faults he did not expect it to handle: a caller with a printer that will not respond gets talked through the restart on the spot, and it is in the transcript, so Oakley knows it has already been tried before he even rings.
What it is actually worth
Oakley has been on the service for months and puts the bookings it has helped secure at dozens. His minimum charge is £70 for the first hour, with around £30 on top after that, so a typical two hour job lands near £100. On his own conservative reckoning that is somewhere between £500 and £1,000 of work a month that would otherwise have gone elsewhere, comfortably ahead of what the subscription costs him.
The retention effect is the part that is harder to put a number on and possibly worth more. A caller who speaks to someone, explains the problem and gets asked sensible questions will wait. A caller who hits voicemail assumes they have been ignored and rings the next name on the list. Callers have not complained once, and reading the transcripts back, Oakley is not always sure they realise they were speaking to an AI at all.
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