AI answering service for after-hours calls — testing results after 60 days

We tested an AI phone answering service for one of our portfolio companies (a plumbing company that was missing about 30% of inbound calls after hours and on weekends). Setup: Used a service called Smith.ai that blends AI + human agents. After-hours calls get answered by AI, which handles basic questions, books appointments directly into the CRM, and escalates emergencies to the on-call tech. Cost: About $600/month for our call volume (~120 after-hours calls/month). Results after 60 days: - Captured 34 new jobs that would have gone to voicemail ($18K in revenue) - After-hours booking rate: 45% (vs 0% before when it just went to VM) - Customer satisfaction: surprisingly high. Most people couldn't tell it was AI or didn't care. - Emergency escalation accuracy: 100% so far — no false alarms, no missed emergencies - One complaint from a customer who "wanted to talk to a real person" — CSR called them back next morning and booked the job The ROI is absurd. $600/month generating $9K/month in revenue that was walking out the door. The only concern is the AI sometimes books jobs we can't service (it doesn't know our service area perfectly). We had to refine the prompts twice to fix edge cases. It's not plug-and-play — you need to spend time training it. If you're missing after-hours calls, this is worth testing. The math is hard to argue with.