The phone rings while you are two hundred miles away
Focused Laser Systems has spent seven years servicing, repairing and supplying CO2 laser machines, the three-axis cutters and engravers that turn a drawing on a screen into a finished piece of wood, acrylic, glass or leather. The customer list runs from schools and universities to manufacturers and people with a machine in the shed at home. Jake Osman built the business around going to them, working a week on, week off pattern from a showroom near Barnstaple in North Devon.
It is a four-person operation. Jake, one workshop technician and two part-time office staff, which usually means one person on the phone at any given moment. When Jake is driving, on a customer site, in a school where phones are not permitted, or underground in London with no signal, the enquiries still arrive. They just arrive at nobody.
He went looking for a call-back button
The original plan was modest. Jake wanted the thing big companies do when you are stuck in a queue: press five and we will ring you back. He started researching whether he could bolt that onto the VoIP system the business already used, and found something considerably more capable.
He shortlisted three or four AI phone answering providers and compared them. Most wanted a full sign-up, a password and card details before he could hear the product work at all. Cyberstaff let him give it his website address and start testing straight away. That was the difference. He never went back to try the rest.
He tried to catch it out, and could not
Jake was sceptical that a system fed nothing but a web address would know anything useful about a niche engineering business, so he set out to break it. CO2 lasers cannot cut metal, so he rang up and asked which CO2 laser he needed for cutting metal. It told him that was not possible. He pushed further, into detail from blog posts he had written years earlier, and the answers came back correct, in the order he would have given them himself.
What convinced him was the other half of that behaviour. Where the AI Receptionist did not have a confident answer, it did not invent one. It offered to take details and arrange a call back instead. Setup took somewhere between ten and twenty minutes: the website, then the FAQ pages and the back catalogue of technical blogs on top.
Three quotes, filtered enquiries and a hundredfold return
Education is a large slice of the customer base, and public sector procurement rules mean schools, colleges and universities must obtain three quotes for every job, however happy they are with their existing supplier. Jake uploaded his pricing documentation so callers get a base figure immediately, with the caveats about mileage, installation and setup attached, rather than waiting on a callback to start the process.
At the other end, the AI Receptionist politely handles the enquiries that were never going to be work: the health and beauty laser calls, and the buyers looking for a two hundred and fifty pound machine shipped from overseas. Focused Laser Systems takes fifteen to twenty calls in a typical week and around half of them now go to the AI Receptionist, rising when Jake is away. In its first fortnight it assisted with four or five bookings, at a typical booking value of £400 to £700. That is roughly £1,600 to £2,000 of work. The Starter tier costs £30 a month, so about £15 across those two weeks, a pro-rated return of more than a hundred to one.
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