The salary is the smallest part
A full-time receptionist costs considerably more than the agreed figure. On top of gross salary come employer social contributions, statutory bonuses, meal allowance, workplace accident insurance and mandatory training.
Then there is what appears on no payroll: recruitment time, the weeks until the person is autonomous, and turnover - when they leave, the whole cycle repeats. We did the full arithmetic in AI receptionist versus human receptionist: the true total cost.
None of this is an argument against hiring. It is an argument against comparing a salary to a subscription, which is the wrong comparison and the one almost everybody makes.
The number that matters is cost per hour covered
One full-time person covers roughly 40 hours a week. A week has 168. After lunches, holidays, public holidays and sick days, real coverage falls below a quarter of the time the phone can ring.
Dividing the fully loaded cost by the hours actually covered gives a very different number from dividing the salary by 40. That is the figure to compare, because it measures what you are actually buying.
This is no criticism of anyone. It is the nature of a human post: a person cannot be in two places at once or work through the night, and should not have to.
What AI covers well, and where it does not reach
Being honest about this saves disappointment on both sides.
Covers well: always answering, including many calls at once and at any hour; booking into the real diary; answering the questions that repeat; capturing and logging information without tiring; confirming appointments the day before; and doing all of it with the same quality at 4am on a Sunday.
Does not cover: greeting whoever walks through the door, making a coffee, signing for a delivery, resolving a difficult complaint that needs judgement and sensitivity, or sensing from someone's tone that they are about to leave and need a human right now.
If the post you want to fill is mostly in-person, hire. If it is mostly telephone, the comparison changes - and the most common answer is not one or the other.
The most common answer is the combination
In most cases we see, the best outcome does not come from choosing. It comes from taking the phone off whoever is on the front desk.
The person keeps the counter, the arrivals, the conversations that need judgement and the customers who build loyalty. The AI takes the repetitive volume, the dead hours and the peaks where a single line turned demand into loss.
It costs less than a second post and covers more hours than either alone. And it has a practical advantage that usually settles the question: it does not require letting anyone go in order to start, which makes the decision reversible.
How to decide without guessing
Three questions almost always settle it:
1. How much of the work is on the phone? If it is most of it, the comparison is direct. If the post is in-person, hire.
2. How many calls do you miss today? Ask your carrier for unanswered history. If the number is high, hiring someone for office hours does not fix it, because most are missed outside them.
3. What is a call worth in your business? The method is in what missed calls really cost.
With those three numbers the decision stops being a matter of opinion. If you want, we run them with you in a 15-minute call - including telling you to go ahead and hire, when that is the answer.