By Yaniv Masjedi, Chief Marketing Officer at Nextiva
In determining how to use AI for customer calls, small businesses have to make a tricky call of their own.
On one hand, missed calls are a giant revenue drain. Using industry benchmark figures, my team at Nextiva has calculated that restaurants can easily lose $30 per missed call. For home and professional services, those figures spike well into the hundreds. And across a month, the lost customer value can reach tens of thousands. (We have a calculator available for any business to calculate its potential losses.)
Why are the costs so high? Largely because people quickly turn elsewhere. A survey found that the vast majority of potential customers whose calls go unanswered won’t leave a voicemail, and will call a competitor.
But having just any AI tool answer calls isn’t the right move either. Overall, customers still prefer human agents, according to recent surveys. The stakes are especially high for first-time callers, since that's the organization’s greatest opportunity to establish a brand relationship with the customer.
So what’s a business to do? Most can’t afford the staff to answer every call. The key is to use a system proven to deliver CX (customer experience) excellence. Here’s how to find the best AI call handler for small businesses.
The transparency mandate
Your agentic voice agent should be up front in explaining what it is. Customers are demanding this.
Research from Gallup and Bentley University found that “77% of Americans don’t trust businesses to use AI responsibly, but 57% say they’d be less concerned if businesses were transparent about how they use it.” And SurveyMonkey found that some people who already trust a business would lose that trust “if they interacted with an AI agent that doesn’t clearly explain it is AI.”
I’ve seen how powerful this can be. At Nextiva, we designed our AI receptionist with this functionality built in. Immediately after thanking the customer for calling, it introduces itself: “This is XBert, an AI assistant on a recorded line.” Honesty is established, and so is trust. Our clients tell us that their customers respond positively.
Don’t sell
Your AI answering service should help the customer achieve their goals; not try to convince them to buy anything.
“In the worst cases, a chatbot can alienate first-time customers if it immediately starts pushing products,” a study from Finland’s Haaga-Helia University of Applied Sciences explains. “This can make customers feel that the company is desperate, which is a turnoff.”
Chatbots can offer an “efficient shopping experience” by providing timely support, and “can act as a guide through the shopping process,” the study adds.
Excel at the human handoff
One of the biggest customer complaints is the inability to get a real person to take over an interaction. New research published by California Management Review bears this out. Customers get trapped in a so-called “chatbot loop,” and become “not only frustrated but angry,” the research says.
“This failure of escalating to human agents can quickly turn a small annoyance into a full-blown breakdown of trust in the business. Even when customers explicitly request for a human agent, the chatbot often responds by saying, ‘Okay, I understand you want to speak to a human agent. To better assist you, I need to know more about the problems you are calling about…’ Some sources have identified this “no easy path to a human” as the single biggest irritant in customer service automation.”
To avoid this, use an AI answering service proven to keep human agents “in the loop.” The LLM powering your voice agent should recognize all the audible cues -- not just the words -- that indicate things are moving in a negative direction. It should instantly signal to a person that the call requires their involvement.
An intelligent system should also recognize the customer during future interactions, regardless of which platform they choose . That’s the true power of Unified Customer Experience Management (UCXM). Your AI voice answering service shouldn't operate in a silo; it should be part of a broader ecosystem that maps and updates a customer's omnichannel journey, preserving their context and preferences for the future.
Businesses are moving quickly toward AI call handlers. Gartner reports that many businesses are specifically “turning to AI to support first‑contact resolution, reduce customer effort, and guide customers through more seamless service journeys.”
So the differentiator will no longer be whether a business has an AI answering service. It will be how good a job that service does. By selecting an AI call handler that’s transparent, never eager to sell, and always happy to pass the baton to a human, you can deliver the CX an unforgettable first impression."