Voicemail vs an after hours answering service
Voicemail records whoever decides to leave a message. An after hours answering service talks to every caller, asks your questions, flags urgent calls and sends you the details in writing. If a 9 to 5 business gets only 1 or 2 calls a week across its 128 closed hours, and none are urgent, voicemail can be enough.
What do callers do when they reach voicemail?
Some leave a clear message, some leave half a message, and some hang up and ring the next business they found. How many do each is hard to pin down. We could not find an independent Australian study that measures it. The figures quoted online mostly come from overseas answering companies with an interest in the result, so we do not repeat them here.
Your own voicemail box is a better guide than any survey. Play back the last 20 messages left after hours and score each one:
| Check | What a usable message has |
|---|---|
| Name | A first name and a surname you can spell |
| Callback number | A number said clearly, or a caller ID you can trust |
| Location | A suburb or street address, if your work happens on site |
| Reason | Enough detail to know whether it is a job, a booking or a question |
| Urgency | Whether the caller needed someone that night |
Count how many of the 20 pass all five checks. Then compare the number of messages with the number of missed calls in your phone records for the same period. The difference is the callers who reached the recording and left nothing at all. The overflow call answering page explains how to export and read those call records.
What does a missed after hours call cost?
The cost rests on four numbers you can estimate from your own records: missed calls a week, the share that are new work, the share of new enquiries that usually turn into jobs, and the gross profit on a typical job. Multiply them for a weekly figure.
An illustration in jobs rather than dollars: a business that misses 8 after hours calls a week, finds that half are new enquiries and normally wins 1 in 4 enquiries, is losing about 1 job a week, or a little over 4 jobs a month. Whether an answering service pays for itself then depends on what one job is worth to you. The cost guide shows how to set that against a monthly fee.
Some losses never show up in that sum. A regular customer with an urgent problem who gets no answer may ring someone else next time as well. A message with no callback number cannot be returned at all.
When is voicemail enough?
Voicemail is a reasonable choice when:
- only a handful of calls arrive outside business hours each week, and none of them is urgent
- most callers are existing customers who know you will ring back in the morning
- your work has no emergency side, such as bookkeeping, design or consulting
- someone already checks messages each evening and returns calls promptly
If that describes your business, put the effort into a better greeting instead of a new service.
How do you make voicemail work better?
A short, specific after hours greeting gets more usable messages. Include:
- The business name, so callers know they dialled the right number.
- Your hours, and the time you will start returning calls.
- What to do in an emergency. For a threat to life, that is to hang up and call 000. For a gas smell, Energy Safe Victoria tells people to ring the emergency number printed on their gas bill.
- Exactly what to leave: name, number, suburb and the reason for the call.
- Where else to find information, such as booking online through your website.
Keep it under 30 seconds. Then check the voicemail box has room, because a full mailbox refuses every new message.
When does voicemail fall short?
- Urgent work. A burst pipe, a lockout or a failed coolroom in a restaurant cannot wait until morning, and a recording does not wake anyone.
- New customers. Someone who found you in a search has other numbers to try, and a beep gives them no reason to wait.
- Simple questions. Callers who want your hours, your service area or whether you take new bookings get no answer from a recording.
- Incomplete messages. Nothing prompts the caller to add a surname, a number or an address, so gaps stay gaps.
- Overflow during the day. Calls that ring out while staff are busy land in the same voicemail box, often at the busiest hour.
How do voicemail and an answering service compare?
| Voicemail | After hours answering service | |
|---|---|---|
| What the caller hears | A recorded greeting and a beep | A conversation with an AI agent or an operator |
| Details captured | Whatever the caller chooses to say | Name, number, address and reason, asked on every call |
| Urgent calls | Wait until someone listens | Transferred to the on-call person or sent by SMS |
| Simple questions | Not answered | Answered from information you approve |
| What you receive | Audio files, sometimes transcribed | A written summary of each call |
| Typical cost | Usually included in your phone plan | A monthly fee or per-call charges |
| What you set up | A greeting | A divert to the service, plus a script and rules |
How do you move from voicemail to an answering service?
You keep your number. The settings on your phone service that currently send unanswered calls to voicemail can send them to an answering service instead, either after a set number of seconds, when the line is busy, or for every call outside business hours. Telstra’s mobile call forwarding guide lists the codes for a Telstra mobile; other carriers and hosted phone systems have their own menus.
Before you switch, ask the provider what happens to a call if its system is unavailable. A setup that falls back to your voicemail is safer than one that rings out. For how a single call is handled once the divert is on, see the after hours answering service. To hear an agent answer instead of a beep, ask for a demo through the enquiry form.