Call answering service
Your competitors answer the phone for about 40 hours a week. There are 168 in a week. Answer all of them and you are not slightly better than the business down the road — you are reachable for four times as much of the week, and at nine on a Sunday evening you are the only one who picked up.
That is the whole proposition, and everything below is detail. The rest of this page is about making sure the call is actually finished when it is answered — because an answering service that only takes a message has not served the caller, it has asked them to wait, and while they wait they are still ringing other numbers.
Your competitor answers the phone for 40 hours a week.
You could answer for all 168.
There are 168 hours in a week. A business open nine to five, Monday to Friday is reachable for 40 of them. The other 128 hours — 76% of the week are evenings, nights and weekends, and they are not dead time: they are when people finish work, sit down and finally deal with the thing they have been putting off.
Cover all 168 and the comparison stops being about who is friendlier on the phone. You are answerable for 4.2 times as much of the week as the business down the road. For a caller at nine on a Sunday evening, you are not the better option. You are the only one that picked up.
The only assumption above is the opening hours, stated plainly so you can argue with it. Everything else is division. If your competitors open longer than nine to five, Monday to Friday, run the sum with their real hours — the gap narrows and it does not close.
The distinction between taking a message and finishing the call matters more than it sounds. A caller who is told someone will ring them back has not been served; they have been asked to wait, and while they wait they are usually still ringing other numbers. A caller who has a confirmed appointment in writing has stopped looking. Everything on these pages is built around getting to the second outcome rather than the first.
Pick the cover you actually need
These are the same system configured differently, so start with the narrowest one that solves your problem. Widening it later is a settings change, not a new project.
- After-hours answering service — Your competitors answer 40 hours a week. Answer all 168. Every evening, night and weekend call picked up, qualified and booked — while they are closed.
- 24/7 answering service — Be reachable 168 hours a week instead of 40, with no rota and no overnight shift to pay for. Every call answered, qualified and booked, including public holidays.
- Answering service for small business — Stop losing jobs to whoever answered first. Every call picked up, booked and logged — without hiring a receptionist, and without per-call charges.
- After-hours concierge service — Sound open when you are closed. Requests completed rather than messages taken, in your tone of voice — for clinics, hospitality, lettings and premium services.
Answering service pricing — what it costs, in pounds and dollars, published rather than quoted. Flat monthly with no per-call or per-minute charges.
Built for your sector
A law firm capturing intake at the weekend and a plumber answering a burst-pipe call at midnight are not doing the same job, and a page that pretends otherwise is no use to either of them. These are written separately because the calls really are different.
- Medical answering service — Every patient call answered, booked or escalated on your rules — day, night and weekend. No clinical triage and no advice, by design.
- Dental answering service — The patient in pain at 9pm books with whoever answers. Make that you — plus cancellations filled automatically so the chair does not sit empty.
- Answering service for law firms — Legal problems start at weekends. Capture the intake, screen it against your criteria and book the consultation before the firm down the road opens on Monday.
- Property management answering service — Tenant emergencies answered at any hour, triaged on your contractual rules, contractors dispatched, and every call logged — the record you will eventually need.
- HVAC answering service — The first cold snap is when customers are won. Answer every no-heat call while competitors ring out — no engaged tone, no extra cost on your busiest day.
- Plumbing answering service — Nobody with water coming through the ceiling waits for a callback. Answer first, give them the stop-tap instruction, and the job is yours before they dial again.
- Real estate answering service — Buyers browse at 8pm and enquire on four properties at once. First to reply gets the viewing — so reply instantly, book it, and confirm before anyone else wakes up.
How it works, in four steps
Nothing here requires you to change your number, replace your phone system or retrain anybody. The usual setup sits behind what you already have.
- Calls divert to it on your terms. After hours, when the line is engaged, when nobody picks up within a set number of rings, or all of the above. Calls you answer yourself are unaffected.
- It answers immediately and works out what they want. Not a menu and not a recording — a conversation, using the information you have given it about your services, prices, availability and service area.
- It finishes what it can. Books into your real diary, answers the question, captures the job detail, confirms in writing.
- It escalates what it should not touch. On your rules, written in your words — this kind of caller, this word, this time of night, ring a human. The rest is summarised and waiting for you in the morning.
What it costs
It starts at $249 a month plus a one-off setup fee, for a single-location small or mid-sized business — larger and multi-site requirements are priced on scope. It is priced per month rather than per call, because per-call pricing charges you most in your best months, which is a strange thing to sign up for. The full pricing page sets out both tiers, what the setup fee buys, and when it is not worth the money. There is also a longer breakdown of what an AI receptionist costs on the blog.
We do not publish competitors’ prices anywhere on this site, for the simple reason that we cannot verify them and quoting a number we have not checked would be the first dishonest thing on the page.
Outside the UK? These pages are read from all over, and the service itself has no geography — software does not have a time zone, so a caller in Denver gets the same answer as one in Dublin. Billing is in pounds sterling and we will confirm the equivalent in your currency before you commit to anything. We would rather do that than print a converted figure here that is wrong by the time you read it.
Is it a person?
No. It is an AI voice and messaging system, and it does not pretend otherwise — partly because that would be a poor way to start a relationship with a customer, and partly because callers work it out anyway. What they care about is whether they got a straight answer at half past eight in the evening.
If you want the honest comparison against the alternatives, including the cases where you should pick something else, we have written those up: versus a traditional answering service, versus hiring a receptionist and versus voicemail.
When you should not buy this
Three situations, and we would rather put them here than let you find out later. If your phone is not ringing, this captures demand that does not exist — that is a marketing problem and we will tell you so. If you have no capacity to act on the calls it catches, answering faster only produces disappointed customers sooner. And if your calls are the service itself — long, unstructured, relationship-led conversations — automation belongs in front of them, not in place of them.
Find out what your missed calls are worth
Most businesses have never counted them, because a missed call out of hours leaves no trace. Two minutes with the calculator, or a short call with us.