5 Best AI Answering Services to Use in 2024

You’re already familiar with this scenario: your team is busy handling call after call, and the phone just won’t stop ringing. Whether it’s a potential customer inquiry or a crucial follow-up, every call counts.

But what if you could ensure that every call was answered, every question addressed, and every lead captured, even when you or your team is not available? Yes, even outside your business hours.

Enter AI answering services, a game-changing solution for businesses of all sizes. These innovative platforms leverage artificial intelligence to handle phone calls, schedule appointments, answer FAQs, and even nurture leads. An AI answering system can analyze and decipher customer intents, resolve customer needs, and automate phone call interactions, ultimately improving customer support and efficiency.

And all that while providing a personalized and seamless customer experience. We’re talking about next-level automation.

Here are some notable examples of AI answering services to use in 2024.

1. Rosie

Unlike human agents, Rosie is always on. Available 24/7/365, this AI phone answering service is there to answer customer calls, book appointments, and provide information even when you’re strapped for time.

Besides standing in for you and your customer support reps, Rosie boasts the following super helpful features:

Appointment booking and customer support. You never have to worry about long waiting times and being understaffed in terms of your customer service department. Rosie will pick up the slack by scheduling appointments and sending confirmation texts, ensuring a seamless customer experience.
Intelligent escalation. Rosie might be an algorithm, but we’re talking about a very sophisticated one capable of detecting emotions such as urgency or frustration in a caller’s voice. In that case, Rosie offers to escalate the call to a human agent, which will make sure that critical issues are handled promptly.
Lead capture and nurturing. Fresh, hot leads are the lifeblood of every business. Rosie excels in lead generation by capturing new prospects and ensuring they never go to voicemail. This maximizes your advertising ROI and prevents business opportunities from slipping through the cracks. Rosie is also trained on your company data to provide accurate information, stay in line with your brand voice, and keep customers happy.
Easy setup and integration. Setting up Rosie is simple and intuitive, requiring no technical knowledge. It integrates seamlessly with your existing systems in just a few clicks, so even if you’re not tech-savvy, the user experience will be breezy.

Upcoming features include:

Appointment reminders and follow-ups. Rosie reduces no-shows by calling appointments ahead of time to confirm. In addition, it also follows up with customers regularly to help you stay top of mind and make promotional offers.
Review requests. Rosie can automatically request reviews on platforms like Yelp and Google Reviews after service, taking this task off your to-do list and helping you build social proof and attract new customers.

With Rosie, you get a reliable, intelligent receptionist who is always ready to enhance your customer service, optimize your operations, and help you grow your business.

2. Simple Phones

Simple Phones is a virtual receptionist service that uses AI to answer phone calls. Just like Rosie, it can be customized to your business and integrated with your customer management system.

Simple Phones leverages advanced technologies like NLU, NLG, and TTS to automate customer interactions, reduce agent workloads, and facilitate complex bidirectional communication, making it one of the top AI call answering services available. You can create your own AI agent and train it according to your company’s style guidelines.

What makes Simple Phones stand out in this quickly-growing marketplace?

The AI agent improves over time. Simple Phones AI learns about your company, products, and customers over time, so it gets better at answering your calls. In other words, the longer you use it, the more accurate at achieving your tone of voice it becomes.
You can turn it into a prolific sales rep. Capable of both answering inbound and making outbound calls, Simple Phones can take up a lot of lead generation and nurturing tasks. That includes cold calling, following up, providing product information, and routing calls to human agents when necessary.
High level of customization. Apart from making and answering calls, this conversational AI bot can also book appointments, calculate ROI, or handle frequently asked questions — anything your business needs. Plus, it features a number of different languages and accents so that you can adapt it to your target market.

The pricing starts at $49/month for the Basic plan. Depending on the features you need and the size of your business, you can also opt for the Advanced plan for $149/month or Premium for $249/month.

3. Voiceflow

If out-of-the-box solutions don’t meet your needs, then you can have an opportunity to build your own AI phone answering system with Voiceflow.

Voiceflow is a platform that allows you to create custom voice experiences, including a sophisticated AI answering chatbot. Whether you’re a seasoned developer or just starting, Voiceflow offers a user-friendly interface and powerful tools to design conversational flows that are natural, engaging, and tailored to your specific needs.

Key features of this solution include:

Visual conversation designer, a feature that helps you create complex conversational flows with ease using Voiceflow’s intuitive drag-and-drop interface. No coding skills are required, which means that it’s accessible to teams with diverse skill sets.
Natural Language Understanding (NLU). Voiceflow leverages advanced NLU to accurately interpret caller intent, ensuring your AI agent understands and responds appropriately to a wide range of queries and requests.
Omnichannel support. Implement your AI assistant across multiple channels, including phone, websites, messaging apps, and smart speakers, and provide a seamless customer experience.
Customization. Tailor your AI agent’s voice, personality, and responses to match your brand identity and create a truly unique customer interaction.
Integration. Connect Voiceflow to your existing systems, such as CRM platforms and databases, to streamline data collection and automate workflows.
Analytics and insights. Gain valuable insights into user interactions, identify areas for improvement, and track the performance of your AI assistant over time.

Voiceflow boasts scalability, meaning that it can grow with your business and allow you to add new features and channels as your needs evolve. This should be a crucial consideration for businesses seeking to create custom voice answering services.

This platform offers several pricing plans to cater to different needs and team sizes, starting from the free Sandbox, which is suitable if you’re starting out. Other plans include Pro for $50/month, Team for $625/month, and Enterprise with custom pricing.

4. PolyAI

Marketed as “the world’s most lifelike voice AI,” PolyAI uses natural language understanding and generation to engage callers in a way that feels personal, human-like, and authentic. It is trained on thousands of real customer service calls to improve its ability to reply in real time and provide high customer satisfaction.

Here’s a roundup of the most important features:

Natural conversation flow. PolyAI’s sophisticated NLU allows its AI agents to understand the nuances of human language, including colloquialisms, interruptions, and changes in topic. This ensures smooth, natural conversations that minimize the robotic feel you might worry about when it comes to chatbots.
Emotional intelligence. PolyAI can detect subtle changes and emotions in a caller’s voice and tailor responses based on that to provide empathetic and effective support.
Multilingual support. This tool can handle calls in multiple languages, allowing you to expand your reach to a global audience and provide consistent service regardless of language barriers.
Customization. Poly’s AI agents can be trained on your specific industry terminology, products, and services, which means they will be able to offer accurate and relevant responses to customer inquiries.
Integration. Seamlessly integrate PolyAI with your existing CRM and contact center systems to streamline data flow and automate processes.
Analytics and reporting. Last but not least, with PolyAI, you’ll gain valuable insights into call volume, customer satisfaction, and agent performance. All these metrics will help you inform your decisions, optimize your operations, and improve the customer experience.

PolyAI can handle large call volumes effortlessly, which will free up your human agents’ time, reduce their workload, and allow them to focus on high-level tasks. This translates to improved customer satisfaction, loyalty, and retention.

PolyAI charges the use of their AI voice assistants on a per-minute basis, and this is something to bear in mind when making a decision about which chatbot to choose.

5. Level AI

Level AI is an AI answering service with a twist — it’s a comprehensive platform designed to transform contact center operations by tapping into the power of generative AI and robust analytics.

It offers virtual receptionist services that provide 24/7 coverage and handle various customer tasks. By leveraging semantic intelligence technologies, Level AI empowers businesses to gain deep insights into customer interactions, automate routine tasks, and enhance agent performance.

Key features of this platform are:

Omnichannel analytics. Level AI analyzes customer interactions across multiple channels, including voice calls, emails, and chats. This provides a 360-degree view of the customer journey and helps identify trends and patterns.
Quality Assurance automation. The platform automatically evaluates agent performance based on predefined criteria. This saves time and resources while ensuring consistent quality standards.
Real-time agent assistance. By providing real-time guidance and suggestions to agents during customer interactions, it helps resolve issues faster and deliver a better customer experience.
Agent coaching and training. Level AI identifies areas where agents can improve and provides personalized coaching and training recommendations. As a result, agents have an opportunity to develop their skills and knowledge, which naturally leads to increased productivity and performance.
Customizable reports and dashboards. With Level AI, you won’t have to guess how your call center is performing. You’ll get customizable, easy-to-understand reports and dashboards that give you a clear picture of what’s working and what’s not.

So, Level AI’s forte is collecting, analyzing, and interpreting customer data to help you uncover their needs, preferences, and behaviors. Using this granular information, your agents can deliver exceptional customer experience.

Level AI’s pricing is available upon request.

Final Thoughts

Customer experience has become a key brand differentiator, so if you want to outperform your competitors, you’ll need a top-notch customer service team.

By adopting AI, you’ll be able to gain a competitive edge and have an always-available, competent, and cost-effective support agent capable of handling multiple interactions simultaneously, ensuring that no missed calls lead to lost opportunities. Say goodbye to long waiting times and frustrated customers, and welcome improved customer satisfaction, loyalty, and, ultimately, increased revenue.