Challenge
Tayvian’s phone was a problem. For every real inquiry about booking a session, four or five more calls were spam. Salespeople. Robocalls. Time wasters. Sorting through them all was draining.
“I was struggling trying to figure out which calls were worth taking and which calls weren’t,” Tayvian said. “So, then I just kind of stopped answering all of them, which is not great.”
The call volume sat in an awkward middle ground. “It’s like it’s not enough for a whole person to do, but it’s too much for me to do with an actual job and me trying to run this.” Hiring a receptionist didn’t make financial sense. Ignoring the phone meant losing real leads.
“I’ve had almost five times as many spam calls as I’ve had actual calls, and that’s what drove me to something like Upfirst.”
Solution
Upfirst answers calls for East Side Sounds, qualifies callers, and filters out spam before anything reaches Tayvian. But the feature that changed his workflow the most was the auto text.
East Side Sounds books sessions through its website. When a caller is looking to book, Upfirst’s AI confirms the intent and sends a text with a link to the booking page. From there, the lead drops straight into Tayvian’s existing funnel on Wix.
“The biggest integration help for me, for sure, was the auto text,” Tayvian said. “If I can have the AI qualify that you’re looking to book, it’s just, ‘Hey, take the text message. Did you get it? Sure. Cool. All right. Do that. See you later.’”
There’s no manual follow-up or phone tag. The caller books online, and Tayvian keeps working.
Results
With Upfirst handling intake, Tayvian spends his time talking to people who actually want to book, not sifting through spam. The spam filter is useful, but Tayvian sees the bigger picture.
“The blocking of the spam calls is kind of like just a nice to have. Really what it is, is getting you closer to live leads and allowing you to like speak with actual people who want something from you.”
He also pushes back on the idea that AI removes the human element from a business. For him, it does the opposite.
“I think a lot of people probably lean away from things like this because they think that it’s taking some of the human element out of it, and I would push back on that and say, you can get a lot more human connection by not having to sift through a bunch of BS and just being able to talk to people once they qualify themselves in a tool like this.”