Should I Hire a Receptionist? 8 Hours vs 24/7

Three sentences, and then the working.

Hire the person if the front desk is a physical place — customers arrive, sit down, are handed a form, need to be shown where to go. Nothing described on this page can do any of that.

Add the AI if what you are losing is calls — after closing, during lunch, on Sundays, or while the one line is already busy. Those calls do not need a person; they need someone to pick up.

Do both if you have a counter and you also lose calls, which is the ordinary situation for a clinic, a salon, a gym or a dealership. The AI answers on your existing number when nobody can, and hands the caller to your staff when they can.

We are not going to tell you to let someone go. A trained front-desk person who knows your customers is worth more than the salary line, and replacing them to save a few thousand rupees a month is usually a bad trade. The honest use of AI here is to cover the hours a human shift structurally cannot.

Write down what the person would do all day. Most owners find the list splits cleanly into two piles.

Pile one — needs a human body in the room. Greeting walk-ins. Handing over documents. Taking cash. Calming down someone who is upset in front of you. Watching the waiting area. Judging when to bend a rule.

Pile two — is a phone task. Answering "are you open", "what does it cost", "do you have a slot on Saturday". Taking a booking. Sending an address. Calling an enquiry back. Reminding someone about tomorrow's appointment.

If pile one is long, you are hiring a person, and the only question left is whether the phone should also be their job. If pile one is nearly empty — you run a service business where customers rarely visit, or the visits are handled by the technician or doctor themselves — then you were never really hiring a receptionist. You were hiring phone coverage, and phone coverage is the part that can now be bought by the minute.

The trap in the middle is hiring one person for both piles and then discovering that the phone rings while they are with a walk-in. That is not a performance problem. One person can hold one conversation.

Salary is the visible number. Whether anything sits on top of it depends on how many people you employ, and those thresholds are what most comparison pages skip.

Two honest notes on that table. First, a five-person clinic is below most of those employee thresholds, so for a lot of small Indian businesses the real cost genuinely is close to the salary — the "hidden costs of employment" argument is weaker here than the vendor blogs make it sound. Second, thresholds and rates in Indian labour law have been under revision, so confirm current applicability with your accountant before you budget from this table.

We deliberately have not built a grand total. Your city, your salary offer and your headcount decide it, and a made-up total would be the least useful thing on this page.

Here is the whole of it, with nothing held back for the sales call.

Dvaarik voice is ₹2 a minute from the first minute, with simple per-minute billing — no subscription, no minimum volume, no lock-in. Chat is ₹2 per conversation across a 24-hour window. Everything runs off one prepaid credit balance, and two things are debited from that same balance: the ₹2,000 phone number recharge every 30 days, and, for founding clients, the Care Plan in months one to three.

Month one, worked out. The minimum first credit load is ₹10,000. All our prices exclude GST, and 18% GST applies when you load credits, so a ₹10,000 load is billed ₹11,800 — ₹10,000 usable plus ₹1,800 GST. From the ₹10,000: ₹2,000 goes to the number recharge and ₹5,000 to the Care Plan at the founding rate, leaving roughly ₹3,000 of usable credit. At ₹2 a minute that is about 1,500 answered minutes, or the same ₹3,000 spent as about 1,500 chat conversations. Months two and three debit the same ₹7,000.

Month four onward. The Care Plan becomes optional. If you drop it, a month with 300 answered minutes costs ₹600 of voice plus the ₹2,000 recharge — ₹2,600 before GST. A month with 1,000 answered minutes costs ₹2,000 plus ₹2,000, so ₹4,000 before GST.

Setup. A custom build is ₹40,000, and it is free for our 10 founding clients. That is a trade, stated plainly rather than in fine print: the free build is in return for taking the Care Plan for the first three months at the founding rate of ₹5,000 a month, and giving us an honest testimonial and a short case study after go-live. If either half of that does not suit you, the ₹40,000 stands and nothing else changes.

One more line that costs money: a second concurrent line, so two callers can be answered at the same time, is ₹1,500 a month. Credits never expire, later top-ups start at ₹500, and at zero balance everything pauses rather than running up a bill.

All of the following, and we would rather say so than pretend otherwise.

• Anything physical. Walk-ins, documents, cash, keys, the waiting room. An AI cannot do a single one of these.
• Reading a person. A good receptionist knows in three seconds that the woman at the counter is frightened rather than annoyed, and changes everything about how she speaks. This is not a feature you can buy per minute.
• Judgement outside the policy. When the rule does not fit the case, a person decides. A well-built AI agent escalates to you instead of improvising, which is correct behaviour but is slower and sometimes worse for the customer.
• Distress and conflict. An upset customer should reach a human being. Our agents are built to hand these calls over rather than argue.
• Relationships over years. Regulars want to be recognised by name, and by the same voice they have heard for three years.
• Everything that is not a phone call. Filing, following up with suppliers, chasing the technician, keeping the place running.

What a person structurally cannot do, no matter how good they are: be on shift at 11pm, answer on a Sunday, take a second call while on the first, cover their own leave, or hold a conversation in Telugu if they only speak Hindi and English. Those are not criticisms of anybody. They are the shape of one human being working one shift.

Find the row that matches you.

Most businesses that come to us match three or four rows at once, which is why the answer is usually both rather than either.

If you are pricing this properly you will not compare only against a salary — you will also compare vendors. Every figure below was read on the vendor's own page on 21 Jul 2026 and is recorded with the sentence it came from. Rates move; re-check before you sign anything.

We are not claiming to be the cheapest, and you should distrust anyone who does — several of the lowest headline numbers in this market turn out to be volume tiers, quote-only tiers, or floors. What we will claim is the terms: ₹2 a minute from the very first minute, no subscription, no minimum volume, no lock-in. Several of the sixteen vendors in our price ledger — including Agni, Aixclerate and ConnectAI, all three in the table above — require a monthly subscription before you can place a single call.

Do not decide this from a blog post, including this one. Run a count.

For seven days, log every inbound call: the time, whether it was answered, and roughly what the caller wanted. Your phone's call log gives you most of it in ten minutes. Then sort the misses into three buckets.

1. Missed because nobody was on shift — before opening, after closing, Sunday, holiday.
2. Missed because the one line was busy — the log will show these clustered around your peak hour.
3. Missed because the person was doing something else — with a walk-in, on a break, away from the desk.

Bucket one and bucket two are exactly what a phone agent fixes, and neither is fixed by hiring harder. Bucket three is a staffing question, and if it is the biggest bucket, hire the person before you buy anything.

Then put a rupee value on it. If the average enquiry that converts is worth ₹3,000 to you, and if the week's log showed nine missed calls, the question is not whether ₹2,600 a month is expensive. Our missed-call calculator does this arithmetic with your own numbers, and it is free and requires nothing from you.

The usual arrangement, and the one we build most often, looks like this. Calls ring your existing number first. Your receptionist picks up during counter hours, exactly as now. Anything unanswered after a few rings — because they are with a walk-in, because it is 9pm, because it is Sunday — rolls to the agent, which answers in the caller's language, handles the question or takes the booking, and drops a summary into a sheet or on WhatsApp so your team sees it in the morning. Anything sensitive gets handed to a person rather than handled.

Nobody is replaced. The change you can check in your own call log is that the calls which used to ring out — after closing, on a Sunday, while the line was busy — get answered instead, and your receptionist stops apologising to walk-ins while a phone rings behind them.

We build each agent for the specific business rather than handing over a dashboard, and we go live in days rather than months. You can hear the thing before you talk to us: the live demo agent is the same technology we would build on. If you would rather just describe the problem, message us on WhatsApp at +91 93923 98750 and tell us what you are losing — we will tell you honestly if the answer is to hire someone instead.