Too busy on site to answer the phone
Surewire Electrical Services is an electrical contractor based in Northern Ireland, carrying out domestic, commercial and industrial work with several vans out on the road. The phone brings a mix of everything: service enquiries, bookings, repeat customers and emergency call-outs, all coming into one main number that Barry McKeown looks after himself.
As the business grew, that became the bottleneck. When you’re up a ladder, on site or in a meeting, you don’t always hear the phone, and voicemail wasn’t catching the slack. People often can’t be bothered leaving a message, and when they do, you rarely get the whole picture. Barry needed some sort of system, so he went looking on Google and found Cyberstaff.
Live in 10 minutes, asking the right questions
Setup was, in Barry’s words, very simple. Within about 10 minutes the whole thing was up and running.
Then came the real test. Barry asked his wife to ring in pretending the bathroom light had stopped working. Without any prompting, the AI Receptionist asked exactly what he would have asked: had she checked the other lights around it, had any work been done recently, and the rest of the checklist an electrician runs through. That was the moment he knew it understood the trade, not just the phone.
Every call seen, none of the rubbish
Barry’s setup is simple. His phone rings first, and if he doesn’t get to it, the call rings out to the AI Receptionist. Each conversation arrives by email with a full transcript, so before he calls anyone back he already knows what the issue is, and whether it’s a real job. He usually rings back within five to ten minutes and picks the conversation up right where it left off, as though he’d taken the call himself.
It has quietly fixed another problem too. Unrecognised numbers now go straight to the AI, and most sales callers simply hang up rather than leave a message. Genuine callers do leave details, so Barry reads them and gets back to them. The rest never cost him a minute, which frees up a lot of time.
Customers kept, not lost to Google
Barry expected people to refuse to talk to an AI. Instead, only around 3% of callers ask for a person; the rest happily have a full conversation. Because callers are told someone will be in touch shortly, they wait for Barry’s call instead of trying the next electrician on Google. He is clear that it has kept him good jobs, good customers and brought in new ones he would otherwise have lost.
Customers have even started showing it off. One, originally won through a call the AI handled, rang late one evening with a friend just to demonstrate it, spinning a wild story about rats in the roof space and a mini hotel in the garden. He texted Barry the next morning to apologise. For Barry, it says everything: the experience was good enough that a customer wanted to show it to his mates.
Next, Barry is setting up out-of-hours routing with advanced call handling, so that genuine weekend emergencies are transferred straight to whichever engineer is on call. His advice to anyone on the fence is simple: ring his number when he can’t answer, have a conversation, and find out for yourself.
Rated Excellent on Trustpilot