Client
Green Hill Fence Company is an outdoor service provider specializing in fencing and high-end landscaping installation in upstate South Carolina. Like most trade businesses, it runs lean: the same people who quote, sell and manage installations were also the ones answering the phone.
As the company expanded, call volume grew faster than the crew could keep up with, and Green Hill realized the phone itself had become the bottleneck: they needed help supporting customer calls.
It is a familiar shape for a trades business: the crew that does the work is the same crew that sells the next job, and both compete for the same hours in the day. The phone loses that contest first, and with it go the customers who called while everyone was on a ladder.
The Challenge
Due to time constraints, Green Hill had to screen voicemails to decide which customers to call back. Existing customers waited longer than they should have, and new prospects often never got a response at all.
“We missed a lot of opportunities to make new customers, and our existing customers were not getting the speedy responses they needed.”
Screening voicemails also meant the office was doing sales triage without sales judgment: guessing which message sounded urgent and which caller sounded ready to buy, hours after the call came in. The challenges will sound familiar to any growing trades business:
- Unable to capture incoming phone leads
- Difficulty routing customer calls
- Employees overwhelmed by customer calls
- Lack of call tracking and documentation
- Lost revenue due to missed calls
The catalyst came when Green Hill’s sales team was headed to a tradeshow and would be unable to answer the phones while away. Could a receptionist service be the answer? After researching several call answering services, they went with Abby based on the positive interactions they experienced with Abby team members.
The Solution
Abby provides Green Hill with a small, dedicated team of real, U.S.-based human receptionists backed by powerful technology. The receptionists answer in the company’s name, capture each caller’s details on the client intake form Green Hill set up during onboarding, route calls to the right person and document every conversation, the same way Abby’s answering service for home services and contractors works for trades businesses across the country.
Green Hill’s favorite features:
- 24/7 call answering and routing, so the phone is covered on job sites, at tradeshows and after hours
- Appointment scheduling handled on the call
- Call tracking and documentation for every conversation
- The client portal and AbbyGO mobile app, with messages and call details in seconds
Human receptionists book appointments through Calendly, so estimate visits land on the calendar during the call itself, and outbound confirmation and follow-up calls are available on any plan when a customer needs a call back. Coverage runs 24/7 with no after-hours or weekend upcharge, so the tradeshow weekend that started the search is now just another covered shift.
“The transition to Abby receptionists taking our customer calls was flawless. We created a client intake form and haven’t had any issues since.”
The Results
With every call answered, Green Hill stopped choosing which customers to call back. The company now works with almost everyone who calls in, and the revenue followed. Doubling revenue did not take a new marketing budget or a bigger crew; it took answering the calls the company was already getting.
Call tracking and documentation closed the loop: every conversation is logged, so nothing rides on a scribbled note or a memory from the job site. And because the receptionists gather the same intake details on every call, the crew arrives at each estimate already knowing the caller’s project. Existing customers feel the difference too: a homeowner mid-project reaches a person who routes the call or takes a documented message, instead of adding to the voicemail pile.
In Their Words
“We instantly were able to grow our revenue because we were able to serve more customers.”
What will your Abby success story look like? Green Hill doubled revenue after working with Abby. Every plan starts with a free trial and no setup fee.
