M. Solomon Casket Company supplies caskets and funeral goods to funeral homes across the country. It's a business-to-business operation in the death care industry, where responsiveness and accuracy matter around the clock. Kyle Ricci, the company's operations manager, was responsible for making sure incoming calls were handled well.
Challenge
M. Solomon Casket already had an answering service. It was even tailored for the funeral industry. But it was built for funeral homes, not for a casket supplier, and the fit showed.
Script compliance was the core problem. Agents turned over frequently, and training never stuck.
"You're constantly getting new people," Ricci said. "We gave them a script, we didn't really feel like it was being followed appropriately."
Ricci pulled call recordings to check quality. What he heard confirmed his concerns.
"Listening to call recordings and things of that nature, it just... answers didn't feel right."
Solution
Ricci researched and demoed several AI answering services before landing on Upfirst. Setup was straightforward. He updated the agent's knowledge base directly through the dashboard.
"Software itself or the dashboard more specifically and the login, super easy to use," he said. "Super easy to help the agent adapt with the knowledge."
The team built a workflow around it. Using Zapier, they route Upfirst call recordings and messages into a Slack channel so the full team stays informed.
"We're able to use Zapier to put the Upfirst call recordings and messages into a Slack channel so everybody can see it," Ricci said.
Call transferring became central to how they handle urgent situations. When a caller needs a person, the agent routes the call rather than handling it alone.
"The call transferring actually is a super useful and beneficial feature for us," he said.
Results
Casket supply doesn't follow a 9-to-5 schedule. Funeral homes call at all hours, and M. Solomon Casket needed an answering solution that could keep pace.
"It's a 24/7 industry, right? I actually think the agent does a very good job of determining, 'Hey, this needs to go to a human.'"
Upfirst's team worked with Ricci to configure the greeting, message forwarding, and routing settings over the first few weeks.
"You guys were great in helping onboard and provide some success over the first couple of weeks to get that in a place that we were comfortable in terms of the greeting and the forwarding messages and all those types of settings," he said.
The result was a meaningful change from how things worked before.
"That's a big nice to have and a big change for us."
And Ricci sees it as a foundation for what comes next.
"I knew this was gonna allow us to grow going forward."
