A regional managed IT provider built an AI receptionist for about £140 a month. It answers every call, day or night, captures the details and books an engineer slot for routine requests. Coordinators who spent around 15 hours a week on the phone now spend under 2 hours checking its work, and roughly a third more enquiries turn into booked jobs.
The firm has two engineering teams and handles 250+ support and onboarding requests a month. Before the agent, calls, emails and portal requests landed in different places, and anything sent overnight waited until morning.
All figures are the firm’s own, as told to aibl.
It runs a scripted intake. The agent answers on a local number, asks for site, issue type, urgency and a preferred time, checks engineer availability in Google Calendar and books the slot. The caller gets a confirmation with a ticket reference. Anything outside the script, or any caller who asks for a person, goes to a coordinator.
About £140 a month for this firm: £47 for Zapier Pro, £35 to £40 for Twilio depending on call volume, and £20 to £30 for the OpenAI API. Upgrading to a better voice model added £10 a month. The founder says the saved coordinator hours and fewer missed calls covered the cost in the first month.
It tried to do too much. The first build graded severity and matched response times on the call, but callers gave patchy information and coordinators redid the work. Cutting the job back to capture and book fixed that. A tinny voice model that misheard technical terms was the other early problem, solved with a better model and a confirmation message callers can correct.
Design it in before the first live call. The firm learned this a few weeks in. Recordings are now kept for 30 days and access to them is restricted. Every call opens by saying AI is handling it, with a route to a person, and the privacy notices cover AI call handling.
If your team loses hours to phones and inboxes, the full case study shows how this firm built and ran its agent:
This case study first appeared in aiblBRIEF’s AI in Practice series. Read the original story: A managed IT firm cut inbound admin time by 87% for £140 a month.
