Auto attendant vs answering service

The actual difference

An answering service employs human receptionists. When your phone rings, one of them picks up, speaks to your customer in your company's name, takes a message, qualifies the enquiry and often books an appointment straight into your calendar. Your customer has a conversation with a person who is not you.

An auto attendant answers with a recorded menu, asks the caller what they need, and rings the phone of the right person on your team. Nobody speaks to your customer except you and your colleagues.

There is now a third category — AI voice receptionists that hold a conversation with the caller. They sit between the two on price and are improving quickly. We do not sell one and we have no view worth publishing on how well any particular one works, so we will not pretend to compare them in detail. What we will say is that they are answering the call, which puts them on the answering-service side of this line, not ours.

What each one costs

Answering services price by volume, and the two dominant models are per call and per minute. Both are published:

Scroll the table sideways to see every column.

Prices are the providers' own published list prices on the date at the top of this page; PATLive notes that "Prices don't include taxes and fees".2 These are two representative providers, not a survey of the market, and rates vary.

The arithmetic that matters is per call. Smith.ai's entry plan works out at $10 a call, and the overage rate above the allowance is higher than the in-plan rate.1 Per-minute plans reward short calls and punish chatty ones: a five-minute conversation on PATLive's 200-minute plan costs about $8.75 of your allowance at the in-plan rate.

When the answering service is the right buy

We are not going to talk you out of this. There are businesses where paying $300 to $800 a month for humans to answer is obviously correct, and trying to save that with a menu is a false economy.

• You physically cannot answer. A dentist with hands in someone's mouth, an electrician on a roof, a barrister in court, a hairdresser mid-colour. A menu that routes to a phone nobody can pick up just relocates the problem.
• A single missed call is worth more than the monthly fee. Personal injury law, plumbing emergencies, elective medical, roofing after a storm. At $10 a call, one converted client pays for a year.
• You need appointments booked, not messages taken. A receptionist who can see your calendar and fill it is doing sales, not reception, and no recorded menu does that.
• You need genuine 24/7 coverage and there is nobody on your team who should be woken up.
• Your callers need handling, not routing. Distressed, elderly or vulnerable callers deserve a person, and a phone tree is the wrong front door.

When routing is all you need

The opposite case is just as common and gets sold the expensive option far too often.

• Your team can answer, they just need the call to find them. Most small businesses are not failing to answer because nobody is available; they are failing because everything lands on one person's mobile.
• You would rather talk to your own customers. For a lot of owner-operated businesses the phone call is the relationship, and outsourcing it loses something real.
• Your call volume is high and each call's value is modest. Per-call pricing is brutal here: two hundred calls a month at $10 each is $2,000 to route enquiries that a menu handles for a flat fee.
• Callers already know who they want. If most calls are "put me through to Dana", a human intermediary is a delay, not a service.
• You mainly need your personal number off the internet. That is a numbering problem, not a staffing one.

The combination nobody mentions

These are not mutually exclusive, and the hybrid is often the cheapest good answer.

Put the menu in front. Route the options your team genuinely answers to your team. Route the one option that must never be missed — new business, or emergencies — to the answering service. You pay per call only on the calls that actually reach it, which is the subset where a human is worth paying for, and you stop paying a receptionist to field calls from your own suppliers.

Businesses that do this typically cut answering-service volume substantially, because a large share of inbound calls are existing customers and vendors who never needed a receptionist in the first place.

The one-line test

Ask what should happen when a customer rings and nobody on your team can pick up.

If the right answer is "somebody should talk to them anyway", buy an answering service. If the right answer is "they should reach the right person, and if that person genuinely cannot answer, leave a message we will act on", you need routing, and that is what we sell for a flat $29 a month.

If routing is the answer but we are not the right supplier of it, our Google Voice alternatives article covers the wider field, and the guide to getting a business phone number maps every category including answering services.

If you are still unsure, the honest advice is to try routing first. It is the cheaper experiment, it takes ten minutes to set up, and if it turns out your calls need a human you will know within a fortnight and can buy the answering service having lost almost nothing.