Have you ever checked your company voicemail in the morning to hear messages from clients annoyed that they couldn’t reach someone overnight? That’s where telephone answering services come in.

With modern technology, there are three main types of answering services: traditional (live person), automated, and AI-driven services. Learn more about their advantages and drawbacks to decide which will work best for your business.

Types of Answering Services

After business hours, when internal staff are unavailable, answering services act as an extension of your team by handling incoming calls on your behalf. Some of the call center services they can perform include:

• Answering inbound calls outside regular business hours
• Taking messages and passing them along as appropriate
• Handling some client inquiries and answering basic questions
• Routing calls to the appropriate individual or location
• Scheduling appointments
• Gathering client information and dispatching someone to respond to urgent situations
• Providing 24/7 availability regardless of the company’s open hours

Answering services can take many forms. The service’s function, responsibilities, and method of operation depend on the business’s needs.

Traditional Answering Services

With a real (human) answering service, incoming phone calls outside regular business hours receive support from real human beings. These live human agents can receive training on your company’s policies, guidelines, and branding to provide personalized support to your clients.

This is the most popular after-hours answering service. Most doctors utilize live-agent medical answering services, so if you’ve ever tried to contact an on-call doctor outside office hours, you’ve likely dealt with this service.

IVR Answering Services

Interactive Voice Response technology is a computerized business phone system that uses a phone tree to take incoming calls and handle inquiries without human intervention. An IVR system can:

• Guide inbound callers
• Interpret the caller’s keypad input
• Route calls
• Retrieve system information
• Provide prerecorded information
• Schedule appointments
• Prioritize calls from predefined numbers
• Conduct transactions

These automated systems are commonly used in the banking and finance industry, among others. Most financial institutions offer an IVR-powered telephone banking system through which you can check account balances, transfer funds, and make other preprogrammed inquiries by pushing numbers on your phone’s keypad.

AI Answering Services

As in seemingly every other facet of business, artificial intelligence is revolutionizing telephone customer service. AI answering services act as a virtual receptionist, using sophisticated technology, such as natural language processing, machine learning, intelligent call routing, and predictive analytics to take incoming calls, interpret the caller’s vocal input, answer common queries, capture data, and more.

By accessing a digital knowledge base, these AI systems can answer any question a caller might ask — as long as the answer is available within its knowledge base and accessible via the caller’s wording.

Professionals and companies in various industries, such as HVAC, plumbing, electrical, and cleaning, use AI answering services to manage emergency dispatch requests, schedule appointments, and even provide basic troubleshooting help.

Benefits of Live vs. AI Answering Service Solutions

Live and AI answering services provide different approaches to answering incoming calls. Human agents and AI systems each have their advantages.

Pros: Live/Human Agents

• Personalized interaction: Live agents build rapport, display empathy and flexibility, and give customer interactions the essential human touch.
• Handling complex queries: They can manage more intricate situations, provide resources, and offer customized solutions.
• Greater customer satisfaction: Many customers prefer interacting with a human over dealing with a “robot,” especially for sensitive or timely inquiries.

Pros: AI Solutions

• Limitless knowledge: AI models can store unlimited information and access answers instantly. They never get distracted and can avoid human error. Many of them support multiple languages.
• Cost-effectiveness over time: These services may be more budget-friendly than human agents, especially for after-hours support or during high call volume. AI models don’t need wages, breaks, or days off, so these solutions can cut business costs.
• Efficiency: They can handle virtually countless calls simultaneously, which slashes time waiting metrics and increases calls answered. Plus, by handling simpler, repetitive queries, AI agents free up human agents to manage more in-depth tasks.
• Scalability: These systems scale easily. Whether your company receives 10 calls or 10,000, AI systems can handle them.

Disadvantages of Live vs. AI Solutions

Each answering service has drawbacks as well.

Cons: Live/Human Agents

• Cost: Generally, these services have higher ongoing costs than AI solutions because of the human labor involved.
• Limited availability: Humans take time off and can only legally work a certain number of weekly hours.
• Slower response times: Although they can handle more complex inquiries, live agents generally have longer response times, especially during high call volumes.

Cons: AI Solutions

• Significant up-front investment: While they may be more cost-effective over time, AI systems are major investments that require a great deal of capital to implement.
• Lack of emotional intelligence: AI can use sentiment analysis to identify callers’ feelings, but only on a limited basis. It isn’t the same as speaking with a live, empathetic human.
• Training and bias: AI can exhibit bias if not properly trained, and thoroughly training an AI system can be time-consuming.
• Customer frustration: Many people have strong feelings against AI, which may lead to increased call abandonment, angry clients, and even customers jumping ship. An AI phone system can also be incredibly frustrating when it doesn’t understand customer commands, whether because of their manner of speech or because the system hasn’t been trained on particular queries.
• Lack of nuance: AI answering services can’t handle issues as complex and nuanced as the queries live agents can field.

The Human Touch Is Irreplaceable

Although an AI answering service has its benefits, using AI exclusively is liable to make customers feel your company has lost the human connection. Moreover, live people can provide the highest level of customer service.

Rather than replacing humans, AI works best in conjunction with them, filling the gaps when internal staff isn’t available and handling simpler queries to free up live agents for more complex tasks.

Absent Answer is a US-based call center that provides 24/7 live agent answering services. Contact us today for information about call center outsourcing, live answering, automated call systems, and more.