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Comment by maccard | Hacker News Reader

I have a friend who runs a trade with an outsourced reception - they employ 3 full time people and the reception is about £150/mo for 9-5 manning of calls. He does the scheduling in the evenings.

If we take OP’s post at face value, presumably his brother is already at 100% capacity otherwise he wouldn’t be missing all these calls.

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£150/mo for each? Do these receptionists actually answer? Has he "tested" them with test calls? Any recommended site to get this?

Well presumably 150 is what you pay to use the service, and they have like 100+ companies using it.

The model is exactly like Planet Fitness or similar gyms: It doesn't work if everyone visits at once, but you plan on most people using it once a week.

Yeah exactly - I don’t know how many calls he gets but it’s less than an amount to employ a full time person, but more than enough that it’s worth having someone to pick up a phone he can stay on the job.

No - £150/mo for the service. I asked him and he said they take the calls, write up notes and he handles the callbacks/etc himself.

I don’t know if he’s “tested”, but he said he’s happy enough with the service. We don’t always have to AB test every possible option - sometimes good enough is good enough.

It's called a telephone answering service. Different companies have different billing methods, but the most common billing method is to bill for "work time" - you pay a monthly fee with a set amount of work time and then pay overage fees for any usage in excess of the monthly allotment. It's a good solution if you don't expect to be hammered with calls during your business hours (e.g. you expect to get at most 30 calls a day rather than 30 calls an hour), but it starts to get prohibitively expensive after you reach a certain volume. It's a good idea to keep track of the usage and consider "upgrading" to a full-time staff member once you get to a certain usage amount (then you just direct calls to the answering service when that staff member isn't available). It doesn't work very well if your call length is long. You also need to be realistic about what you want the agents to do. It's not like they can provide top tier support or resolve issues. Expect it to be exactly what it is, which is a telemessaging service. You'll usually get better luck with ones that specialize in specific industries. There are some that only answer for law practices, for example. Some only provide day-time support, while others run 24/7.

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