Somebody has pointed out that the business is closed exactly when customers get home from work, and now the question is what to do about 6pm to 10pm. The three usual answers are to pay someone to stay on, to hire an answering service, or to put an assistant on the website. Each has a supplier who will tell you it is obviously the cheapest.
The honest answer depends on two numbers only you have: how many enquiries arrive in those four hours, and through which channel. A per-call service is cheap when calls are rare and expensive when they are not. A staff member is expensive when it is quiet and good value when it is busy.
So instead of quoting industry averages, this piece works through the after hours coverage cost of each option with example figures you should replace with your own. Every number below is illustrative.
Step one: count what actually arrives
Before pricing anything, get the evening picture from your own records. Take the last eight weeks and fill in something like this.
| Channel | Evening enquiries per week (6pm to 10pm) | How many needed action that night |
|---|---|---|
| Phone calls | Your number | Your number |
| Website forms and chat | Your number | Your number |
| Your number | Your number |
For the worked example, imagine a home services business with 14 evening website enquiries a week and 6 evening phone calls. Of all 20, perhaps 2 genuinely needed someone that night; the rest wanted answers, prices or a callback.
Also note which evenings are busy. Many businesses find two or three nights carry most of the load, which changes the staffing maths.
Option one: keep a person on in the evening
A staff member can answer phones, reply to web chat, check the diary and make judgement calls. That flexibility is the main thing you are paying for.
Worked example, with rates you should swap for your own:
- Four hours a night, five nights a week, is 20 hours.
- At an example hourly cost of £14, plus an allowance for employer costs such as pension and holiday (say 20%), that is about £16.80 an hour.
- 20 hours at £16.80 is £336 a week.
- Over a month (about 4.33 weeks) that comes to roughly £1,455.
- With 20 evening enquiries a week, the cost per enquiry handled is about £16.80.
If volume doubled to 40 a week, the monthly cost would not change and the cost per enquiry would halve. If it fell to 8 a week, each enquiry would cost about £42. People are worth it when there is enough work; a quiet evening is mostly paid waiting. Also factor in cover for sickness and holidays, and whether anyone actually wants the shift.
Option two: an answering service
Phone answering services take calls on your behalf, pass on messages and sometimes follow a simple script. Pricing models vary a lot: per call, per minute, a monthly bundle of minutes, or a base fee plus overage. Our guide to how much a phone answering service costs explains the models in detail.
Worked example, again with placeholder figures:
- Per-call pricing: 6 evening calls a week at an example £1.50 a call is £9 a week, or about £39 a month.
- If volume grows: 25 calls a week at the same rate is about £162 a month, before any minimum commitment or setup fee.
- Website coverage: none. Your 14 evening website enquiries still wait until morning, unless the service also offers web chat as a separate product.
Answering services are often good value for low, unpredictable call volume. The catch is that they mostly take messages rather than answer questions, so a caller asking about prices often gets "someone will call you back".
Option three: a website assistant
A website assistant answers visitors on your site from your own content, captures details, opens tickets and hands over to a person when someone is on duty. It does not answer phones. Be clear about that before comparing, because it only addresses one of your channels.
Worked example using SpideyChat's published pricing:
- The Starter plan is $20 a month ($17 billed annually), with 2,000 messages a month and lead capture.
- 14 evening website enquiries a week, at perhaps 8 messages per conversation, is around 480 messages a month, well within the allowance even with daytime traffic added.
- The cost does not change between a quiet week and a busy one, because pricing is flat rather than per conversation.
- It covers the evening, and also the night and weekend, for the same price.
The limits are real. It answers from what you have taught it, so a question with no content behind it becomes a captured enquiry rather than an answer. It cannot check a diary or book anything directly. The pricing page lists what each plan includes.
Putting the three side by side
Using the example business, 14 web and 6 phone enquiries across the evenings each week:
| Evening staff | Answering service | Website assistant | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Example monthly cost | About £1,455 | About £39 at current call volume | $20 |
| Covers phone | Yes | Yes | No |
| Covers website | Yes | Usually not | Yes |
| Answers questions | Yes | Usually takes messages | Yes, from your content |
| Cost if volume doubles | Same | Roughly doubles | Same, within plan limits |
| Handles emergencies | Yes | Can pass on urgently | Captures and flags, cannot act |
In this example, the combination most businesses land on is the website assistant for web enquiries plus an answering service for the handful of phone calls, at a small fraction of the staff cost. A business with 60 evening calls a week and complex customer conversations might reach the opposite conclusion. The cheapest way to cover after-hours enquiries looks at more combinations.
Run your own numbers tonight
Pull the eight weeks of timestamps and fill in the channel table. Get one written quote from an answering service for your actual call volume, and check what a staff member would cost you per hour including employer costs. Then drop your figures into the chatbot ROI calculator to see the website side.
If most evening enquiries come through the website, start there, because it is the cheapest piece to test. If most come by phone, the website assistant will not fix that, and you should spend your time on the answering service quote instead.