How many calls can an AI receptionist take?

The allowance question is easy to answer and most of this category hides it anyway. Our plans and overage rates are printed next to each other on the pricing page.

The simultaneous-calls question is different, and it is the one buyers usually mean when a busy morning is on their mind.

The answer is that calls landing together are each picked up. There is no line of callers waiting for the one in front to finish, because nobody is waiting for a free person.

The assistant answers several calls at once. What it can't do is make your phone line carry more calls than your carrier allows, and that is where a busy morning usually breaks.

Your line has a channel limit. On many small-business plans that number is smaller than people think, and callers beyond it get a busy tone before any answering service, ours or anyone's, has a chance to pick up.

So check two things. Ask your carrier how many simultaneous calls your number supports, and bring your busiest hour from a real call log to a demo so you can watch the overlap being handled.

The allowance side is worth working out in the same conversation. Count last month's inbound calls and the arithmetic against our three tiers takes about a minute.

One thing we can say plainly. Calls above your allowance are charged at a published rate rather than blocked, so a busy month costs money rather than customers.

Say you run a heating and air company and you've bought a radio spot that airs at 7:45am. In the ten minutes after it plays, 30 people call. Both halves of the capacity question show up at once.

The simultaneous half first. Every caller who reaches GreetKeeper gets their own instance of the assistant, so nobody waits behind anybody. Reaching us is the catch. If your VoIP account allows four concurrent calls on that number, the fifth caller hears a busy tone from your provider before we're ever involved. One call to your phone provider the week before the ad, asking them to raise the limit for the campaign, fixes that.

Then the allowance half. A normal month for you is 520 calls, and the campaign adds 180, for 700. That fits inside Professional's 750 at $149. On Starter the same month would cost $49 plus 500 overage calls at $0.45, which is $274. You'd move up a tier for that month.

Annual averages hide the months that matter. Take a landscaping firm with 90 calls in January and 640 in May. Averaged out, that looks like a Professional customer all year. Month by month it isn't.

January on Starter costs $49, and paying $149 for it would waste $100. May on Starter would cost $49 plus 440 overage calls, or $247, against $149 on Professional. The right answer is Starter in winter and Professional from about April, and changing plans is allowed, so nothing stops you doing exactly that.

Pull twelve months of call counts from your carrier and write them in a row. Mark any month above 422 calls, which is where Professional becomes cheaper than Starter with overage. Those are your Professional months.

If you're planning something that will spike calls, such as a mailer, a TV spot or storm season, tell us the number you expect. We don't publish a simultaneous-call maximum, so an unusual peak is worth a direct conversation in advance.

Starter is $49 for 200 answered calls, Professional $149 for 750, Scale $349 for 2,000, with the overage rate printed beside each one.

Billing is per answered call rather than per minute, so a long call that goes well costs the same as a thirty-second wrong number.

Very short calls, robocalls and calls the assistant screens out don't count toward your plan. The pricing page has a short table of what counts, so you can size a tier on real conversations.