From Voicemail to eBay Sale: After-Hours Calls That Now Close Business

This article is part of the local UponAI blog library and focuses on practical AI voice and communications workflow lessons that matter in live business environments.

UponAI Customer Story · Hosted Voice

Company

Advanced Hosted Services

Industry

Hosted voice / VoIP

Founded

2016 (parent 2008)

Footprint

NY-area, 16 states

Scale

~6,000 endpoints

With UponAI

~1 yr · 3–4 clients

75%

Fewer missed calls

~25%

Estimated lift in bookings

6,000

Endpoints under management

The Setup

A cabling company that went all-in on VoIP

Advanced Network Services sold and installed NEC and Toshiba phone systems. In 2016 it shifted 100% to VoIP, split the business, and Advanced Hosted Services was created.

Today it manages roughly 6,000 endpoints, serving mostly the New York area but active in 16 states. President Paul Bonelli has been in the business over 30 years — starting in the military, then cabling and phone systems, then UCaaS.

The problem he set out to solve is the oldest one in voice: the call nobody answers. For his customers, after-hours calls were becoming voicemails. Routine issues were escalating as emergencies. Callers had no way to get an answer until morning.

The Results

What actually moved — and why

Six months of internal use, then four to five months with customers. Most run UponAI as an answering service or after-hours line.

“Missed calls have been reduced by about 75%.”
Paul Bonelli, President, Advanced Hosted Services

The 75% is the headline, but it isn’t the mechanism. Paul described a chain of four changes that produce it — each one removing a reason a call previously went nowhere:

1. The call gets answered

Agents pick up after hours instead of routing to a mailbox — so the call exists as an interaction, not a message.

2. The call carries more information

“The calls that they’re getting, they’re now getting more information.” Transcripts and structured detail replace a 20-second voicemail.

3. The call gets triaged, not escalated

Calls that would typically have become emergency calls aren’t — the agent triages, opens a ticket, and the ticket is addressed the next morning.

4. The agent is freed for work that needs a human

More customers self-serve. Paul’s summary: “freeing up agents and giving us better quality of information.”

On bookings: Paul’s estimate is ~25%, and he qualified it himself — “bookings is hard to say because we don’t have a lot of customers using the calendar features. So if I was to say bookings, let’s say bookings could be up about 25% based on the data that I’ve seen.” Treat it as a directional read from limited calendar adoption, not a verified company-wide result.

Customer Story

The collectibles company that sells while it’s closed

One customer shows the difference between preventing a missed call and creating a sale.

Before UponAI

1. Customer calls after hours
2. Line rings out
3. Voicemail, or nothing
4. Message handled next day — if it was left

→ Missed call

With UponAI

1. AI agent answers after hours
2. Caller asks about a specific collectible
3. Agent checks inventory for availability
4. Agent sends a link to buy it on eBay

→ Sale, at 9pm

“So now the customer is not only just not missing calls, they’re also getting sales after hours by using UponAI.”
Paul Bonelli, President, Advanced Hosted Services

That flips the economics of the pitch. A missed-call fix is cost avoidance, and cost avoidance is always deferrable. An after-hours sales channel is not. The transcript does not quantify those sales — no volume or revenue figure was provided.

Implementation

Easy to integrate, with a real learning curve

“It was easy to integrate. It’s a learning curve, obviously, because you’re using AI versus using traditional methods of outcome being exactly what you enter. AI is a little bit different, where it’s more generalization. But we’ve been happy with the process.”
Paul Bonelli, President, Advanced Hosted Services

For a team that has configured deterministic IVRs for decades, that shift is the real adjustment — not the integration work. Training landed easier than expected: “The training process was not as difficult as I thought it would be. And even while we were going through training sessions, the product was getting better and easier to use.”

The features Paul named

Knowledge base — what lets the agent answer an inventory question instead of taking a message.
Email with call transcripts and links — the call documents itself and can carry a purchase link out with it.
Text messaging to on-call people — the escalation valve that makes aggressive triage safe.

Asked what he still wants: “CRM integration is the future… that’s going to be the most important feature that I think anybody releases.”

Why It Matters For VoIP Providers

Paul’s recommendation

“I absolutely would. UponAI is very powerful. It’s got a lot of integrations and it’s got a great development team behind it.”
Paul Bonelli · asked whether he’d recommend UponAI to other VoIP providers

He was blunt about roadmap speed, which for a reseller is a risk calculation: “The development team is actually ahead, which is pretty rare. Usually the end users are ahead of the development team, but in this case the development team seems to be releasing the product faster than we could even ask for it.”

The pattern is repeatable. Run it internally first, learn it on your own calls where the stakes are lowest, then take it to customers with real operating experience behind the pitch. Six months in, four or five months out — and an AI agent attaches to endpoints you already own, in a market where seat pricing keeps compressing.

UponAI · Customer story: Advanced Hosted Services · Interview with Paul Bonelli, President · August 12, 2026

What This Means

UponAI content is built around production use, not generic AI positioning. The goal is to help teams understand how routing, call handling, automation, and human handoff behave once the system is part of daily operations.