AI receptionist or hiring a receptionist?

Vendor pages like to quote an annual saving in the tens of thousands. We do not repeat those figures, because nobody publishes the working behind them and the honest answer depends entirely on what your receptionist actually does.

Work it out for yourself instead. Take the salary, add employer costs, and then subtract the value of everything that is not phone work. What remains is the only part an AI is competing with.

For a practice with a full front desk, that remainder is often small. For a two-van plumbing business with no front desk at all, it is the whole job.

A human wins on judgment. An angry customer, an unusual request, a regular whose history matters, a moment that needs someone to take responsibility. None of that is a scripted interaction.

A human also wins on everything physical. Signing for deliveries, showing someone to a room, noticing that the waiting room is full.

An AI wins on hours and on simultaneity. It answers at 11pm and on a Sunday, and it answers six calls at once without any of them hearing a ring-out.

It also wins on the boring consistency. It asks for the same six details every single time, which is why the message you get back is always usable.

Say you own a physical therapy clinic. Your front-desk coordinator earns $18 an hour and handles about 45 calls a day at roughly two and a half minutes each. That's close to two hours of her eight on the phone. Add around 20% for employer costs and the phone portion of her job runs near $900 a month across 21 working days.

Sending all 945 monthly calls to GreetKeeper would cost $149 on Professional plus 195 overage calls at $0.35, so $217.25. But you weren't going to cut her hours, so that isn't a saving. It's two hours a day she gets back for check-ins, insurance paperwork and the patient standing in front of her.

The more common setup is smaller. If she keeps answering and only the calls she can't reach get forwarded, say 12 a day including evenings, that's 252 calls: Starter at $49 plus 52 at $0.45, or $72.40 a month.

Before deciding anything, have whoever answers your phone keep a tally for five working days. Two columns will do. The first counts calls that followed a pattern: booking, rescheduling, directions, hours, a price. In the second go the calls that needed her in particular, because she knew the patient, smoothed over a complaint or made a judgment nobody had written down.

Pull the carrier log for the same week and count the calls that arrived before opening, over lunch and after closing. Those are calls no daytime hire would have answered anyway.

If the second column is long, you need a person and the assistant is overflow at most. When the first column dominates and you were about to hire a second coordinator mainly for phones, price that hire against the numbers above. And if most of your front-desk work is walk-ins, deliveries and people at the counter, the phone was never the job, and nothing on this page should talk you out of hiring.

GreetKeeper starts at $49 a month for 200 answered calls, with $0.45 a call after that. That is the whole comparison on the cost side, and it is on the pricing page rather than behind a form.

The common setup is not either-or. Forward on busy-or-no-answer, so your receptionist keeps answering and the assistant catches what they miss.

Transfers go to your team, so the calls that need a person still reach one.