Stephannie Jones is a creative artist who goes by the stage name Sunny J. Shores. She's been a digital nomad since 2004, running her business from wherever she happens to be. Right now, that's a rural area in the Netherlands.
Challenge
Working across time zones makes a simple thing complicated: keeping office hours. Stephannie's work spans countries, and there's no single window when everyone is awake.
"Because there's so many different time zones involved, being able to have office hours has always, always been a challenge."
She tried GoodCall, her first AI receptionist. It worked for a while. Then the price went up and the features went down.
"I'm not an international chain. I'm small potatoes. They kept raising the rates and cutting down what the options were. So I said, 'There's gotta be somebody else out there.'"
There was also the question of credibility. Operating from rural Netherlands, Stephannie needs to prove her business is legitimate and professional.
"I'm currently in a very rural area in the Netherlands, so I have to prove where I make my money and prove a professionalism."
Solution
Stephannie found Upfirst, and one feature made the decision easy.
"The deciding factor was multilingual."
For someone running a business across borders, multilingual support matters. But it wasn't just the language capabilities. The way Upfirst handles calls felt different from everything else she'd tried.
"Being able to have the AI act more like a receptionist or a secretary versus an answering machine, that's just awesome. The other ones didn't have that functionality."
Upfirst now screens her calls, handles transfers with passcode verification, and manages conversations the way a human employee would. For Stephannie, that added the professional layer her business needed.
"And Upfirst was very instrumental in adding to that professional layer."
Results
Stephannie found the platform straightforward to set up. The test call feature let her verify everything before going live.
"Very easy interface with the dashboard. The test call feature where you can call and check everything out, and I found that I could just have a conversation with the AI agent just like I would a human employee."
The quality of the interaction is what impressed her most.
"That's what AI is supposed to be. And so to me, that was the best."
Compared to her previous service, Upfirst costs less and does more. The switch was simple.
"And that's how I found you guys, and you guys, for less money, offer me so much more. It was a no-brainer. Of course I switched."
For a solo creative artist running a global business from rural Netherlands, Upfirst handles the phones so she can focus on her work.
