Option one: hire a receptionist
The gold standard for warmth and judgment. A good receptionist knows your regulars, reads moods, and handles the weird stuff. The problem is arithmetic: salary, benefits, and coverage put a full time hire at $45,000 a year or more, they work 40 of the week's 168 hours, and they take holidays exactly when your phones are busiest.
Right choice when: you have an office, steady daytime volume, and enough admin beyond phones to fill a day. Usually that means 8 or more staff.
Wrong choice when: you're a crew of one to five. The math just doesn't close.
Option two: a live answering service
Outsourced humans, often hybrid with software, typically $100 to $300 or more per month plus per-call or per-minute fees that climb fast with volume. You get a real person, but one juggling scripts for dozens of unrelated companies. They take messages well. They book jobs and answer real questions about your business unevenly, because they don't know your business. And the good ones are mostly US call centres, which BC callers can hear.
Right choice when: your calls are complex and emotional, message-taking is genuinely enough, and budget is flexible.
Wrong choice when: you want calls actually booked into your calendar, qualified your way, at 2 am, without per-call fees stacking up.
Option three: an automated answering system
The new option, and the one we sell, so weigh that as you read. A system trained on your specific business answers instantly, every time, all at once during call floods. It qualifies callers with your questions, books your real calendar, texts confirmations, and logs transcripts. Modern voices are natural enough that most callers don't notice. Cost runs $199 to $599 a month flat. What it can't do: exercise human judgment on a truly strange situation, or comfort a furious customer like a person who knows them can. The honest pitch is coverage and consistency, not warmth.
Right choice when: you're an owner-operator missing calls on jobs, after hours, and during rushes, and you want jobs booked rather than messages taken.
Wrong choice when: your call volume is tiny and predictable, or your calls genuinely require human judgment every time.
The test that settles it
Don't decide from a blog post, including this one. Call an automated system and judge the experience yourself. Ours answers at (604) 990-2791, around the clock. If it doesn't sound good enough for your customers, don't buy it. If it does, the math is here.