Working it out
Three ways to stop
missing calls.
An AI receptionist, a phone answering service, or hiring someone. Here is what each one costs a UK business, and what each is honestly better at.
| What you are comparing | Hiring someone | Answering service | England Voice |
|---|---|---|---|
| Cost, first year | about £29,300 | £1,800 to £4,800 | £2,088 |
| Every year after | about £29,300 | the same again | £1,788 |
| Hours covered | 37.5 a week | often around the clock | Around the clock |
| Nine on a Sunday | No | Usually | Yes |
| Knows your prices | Yes | From a script you write | From your own website |
| Books into your calendar | Yes | Sometimes, for a fee | Yes |
| Three callers at once | No | Yes | Yes |
| Holiday and sickness | You arrange cover | Covered | Does not apply |
| Greets people at the desk | Yes | No | No |
| Reads a distressed caller | Yes | Yes | No |
What hiring actually costs
The salary is not the cost. The average UK receptionist salary is £25,628, and an employer pays National Insurance and a pension contribution on top of it.
| Salary | £25,628 |
| Employer National Insurance | £3,094 — 15% of earnings above the £5,000 threshold |
| Employer pension | £582 — 3% of qualifying earnings above £6,240 |
| Total | £29,304 a year |
One caveat, and it works against us. The Employment Allowance is £10,500. If your business is eligible and has not already used it, it can wipe out that National Insurance entirely, which brings the real figure closer to £26,200. We would rather you heard the smaller number from us than found it yourself afterwards.
None of that includes recruiting, training, the 5.6 weeks of statutory holiday you have to cover, or the desk they sit at. And 37.5 hours is 22% of the week. The other 78% is when a good many people ring.
Which one you actually want
Hire someone if the phone is the smallest part of the job
A receptionist greets patients, chases paperwork, calms someone down in front of them and reads a room. No AI does any of that. If your front desk needs a person, it needs a person, and we are not going to pretend otherwise.
Use an answering service if calls need judgement
A human on the other end can handle a genuinely unusual call, a distressed caller, or a conversation that goes somewhere no script anticipated. They cost more per call than we do and they do not know your prices unless you write them a script, but on nuance they win.
Use us for the calls nobody is there to take
Evenings, weekends, lunch, the school run, the twenty minutes you were with a customer. That is where the missed calls actually are, and answering them costs less than a fortnight of the salary above. Most of our clients keep their receptionist and put us behind them.
We publish a list of what our agent cannot do, which is worth reading before you decide anything.
Work out what it is costing you.
The calculator on the homepage uses your own numbers. Or build an agent on your business and ring it yourself, which takes about ten seconds and costs nothing.