The AI receptionist adverts compare it to a £25,000 salary. That is the wrong sum

If you run an appointment-based business, you have seen the advert by now. An AI receptionist that answers every call, day and night, for less per month than a person costs per day. The sum is usually right there in the copy: a receptionist is £25,000 a year, this is £99 a month, you do the maths.

The maths is fine. It is the comparison that is wrong.

The problem it points at is real

Start with the honest part: missed calls genuinely cost money. A caller who reaches voicemail at a trades firm, a clinic or a salon does not usually leave a message. They ring the next name on the list, and the next name answers.

Anyone whose phone rings while they are on a roof, in a treatment room or halfway through a cut knows this is not a hypothetical. The vendors did not invent the problem. They invented the framing.

What the machine actually does

An AI answering service captures the call. It greets the caller, takes a message, books an appointment into a diary it has been connected to, and screens out the recorded spam. At the prices being charged, from under £30 a month at the bottom to a few hundred at the top, that can be decent value.

What it does not do is resolve the call. It does not know that this caller is your best customer and the last job overran. It cannot price a job, because pricing needs the judgement you have and it does not. It cannot decide that this one is urgent enough to interrupt you, and that one is not, and be right about it, twenty times a day.

An answered call is not a handled call. The advert prices the answering. The salary was buying the handling.

That is why the salary comparison flatters the product. A good front-of-house does not answer calls for a living; they run the front of the business. Nobody's £25,000 was buying a greeting.

Work out which problem you have

There are two different problems hiding inside "we miss calls", and they have different fixes at very different prices.

Dropped calls: new enquiries ringing off because nobody picked up, evenings and lunchtimes worst. This is the problem the AI answerer is built for, and the cheapest fixes are cheaper still.

Dropped context: the same customers ringing back a second and third time to move something along, because whoever answers does not know where it got to. No answering layer fixes this. The call was never the problem; what happens after it is.

01Pull last month's call log and voicemail list
02Sort the misses into two piles: new enquiries, or existing customers chasing
03Fix the bigger pile first, and price the fix against that pile only

Ten minutes with the call log settles it. Most firms who do this are surprised which pile is bigger.

The subscription you already pay for

Before buying a new one, look at the phone system you have. Modern business phone plans, Teams Phone among them, include an auto attendant, routing by time of day, ring groups that try the office then the mobiles, and voicemail that lands in your inbox as a transcribed message you can read between jobs. Set up well, that quietly deals with a large share of the dropped-calls pile.

We moved a client off an ageing phone system onto Teams Phone, and the part of that project that mattered was not the technology. It was rebuilding the call flows: who rings first, what happens after four rings, what the caller hears at six in the evening. Every one of those features was already in the licence. Most firms are paying for this and using none of it.

Where the AI answerer earns its place

None of which makes the product useless. As an overflow net, it is a reasonable buy: it catches the calls that arrive while every human is busy, the ones at nine in the evening, and the spam. A salon that loses two bookings a week to unanswered lunchtime calls will cover the subscription easily.

Treat it as a net under the business, not a person in front of it, and the cheaper tiers are priced about right for what they do.

The other half of the sum

If the call log says your problem is dropped context, the fix is a person who holds it. That is what the salary was buying, and it is what our retained executive support work is: the same person throughout, who knows which client is which, what was promised, and what to do with the call after answering it. It costs more than £99 a month, because it does the part the £99 does not.

Plenty of firms need neither. They need the call flow on their existing system set up once, properly, and a voicemail message that does not sound like an apology. That is an afternoon's work, not a subscription, and it is the right answer often enough that it should be the first thing ruled out.

We work with businesses across Knutsford, Alderley Edge, Wilmslow, Altrincham, Stockport and Warrington. Working out which pile your missed calls fall into is a first-hour conversation, and the first hour is free.