AI
Most of Your Calls Are Routine. Here’s What to Do About Them
“Are you open on Saturday?” “Can I move my appointment to Thursday?” “Where do I park?” “Did you get my email?”
If you run a small business, you’ll know these calls. Each one takes a minute or two. Each one pulls someone away from whatever they were doing. And while your team is answering the fifth parking question of the day, the call from a new customer with a real job for you is ringing out.
You’ll often hear that most business calls are routine. It’s probably true for plenty of small businesses, but there’s no single figure that fits everyone. The real split depends on your sector, your customers and how much information you already publish online.
So instead of giving you a number, this article shows you how to find your own, and what to do once you have it.
What counts as a routine call?
A routine call is one where the caller wants something predictable, the answer already exists somewhere, and nobody needs to use judgement to deal with it. Typical examples:
- Information requests: opening hours, prices, directions, what services you offer
- Bookings and changes: new appointments, reschedules, cancellations
- Status checks: “Has my order gone out?”, “Is my engineer still coming?”
- Simple admin: updating contact details, asking for an invoice to be resent, paying a bill
- Wrong department: callers who just need putting through to the right person
Compare those with the calls that actually grow your business: a new enquiry that needs a proper conversation, an unhappy customer who needs a human, a supplier negotiation, a quote for a big job. Those deserve your team’s full attention. The trouble is that both kinds arrive on the same line, and they all sound the same until someone picks up.
Why routine calls cost more than they look
A two-minute call about opening hours doesn’t sound expensive. The cost is in what surrounds it.
The interruption
Whoever answers has to stop what they were doing, deal with the call and then pick up where they left off. For a practice manager, a solicitor or an engineer planning a job, that’s rarely a clean two minutes.
The call you miss while you’re on the routine one
In a small team there may only be one or two people who answer the phone. If they’re tied up confirming a booking, the next caller gets voicemail or an engaged tone. You’ll never know whether that was another routine query or your best enquiry of the month.
Out-of-hours calls
Plenty of routine calls come in when you’re closed: evenings, weekends, bank holidays. Most of those end in voicemail, which means a callback list waiting for you the next morning.
Measure your own split: the one-week call log
You don’t need software or a consultant for this. You need a week and a bit of discipline.
- Pick a normal week. Avoid bank holidays or your busiest seasonal peak.
- Give everyone who answers the phone a simple tally sheet (paper by the phone works fine), using the categories below.
- After every call, add one tick in the category that fits best. It takes seconds.
- Note missed calls and voicemails too. Your phone system’s call history will show calls that weren’t answered.
- At the end of the week, add it up. Work out what share of answered calls were routine, and roughly how long they took.
| Category | Examples | Routine? |
|---|---|---|
| Information | Hours, prices, directions, services | Yes |
| Bookings and changes | New, moved or cancelled appointments | Yes |
| Status and admin | Order updates, invoices, payments | Usually |
| Put me through | “Can I speak to Sarah?” | Yes |
| New business | Quotes, new enquiries, sales conversations | No |
| Problems and complaints | Faults, unhappy customers, anything sensitive | No |
| Nuisance | Cold calls, spam, wrong numbers | Filter out |
Make it easier: if you’re an Edison VoIP customer, your call reports already show when calls came in, how long they lasted and which went unanswered. Adding call transcription (£5/month with Edison AI, or £1/month if you bring your own AI provider) gives you a written record of each call, so you can sort them by reason without relying on memory.
Reading the results
Once you have a week’s figures, ask three questions:
- What share of answered calls were routine? This is your real number. It might be higher or lower than you expected.
- When do routine calls arrive? If they cluster first thing in the morning or at lunchtime, that’s exactly when your team is most stretched.
- How many calls went unanswered, and when? Missed calls outside opening hours are the easiest win of all.
Some routine calls are best fixed at the source. If half your information calls are about opening hours, check they’re correct on your website and your Google Business Profile. The cheapest call to handle is the one that never needs to be made.
What AI can take off your hands
For the routine calls that remain, an AI receptionist is now a practical option for small businesses. Edison’s AI Receptionist is built into our VoIP platform, so it answers on your existing business number. It can:
- Answer every call, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week
- Answer frequently asked questions using information about your business
- Book appointments
- Route calls to the right person, passing on what the caller needs
- Create records and tickets in your CRM
- Send customers a payment link
When a caller asks for a person, or the query needs a human, the call goes through to your team. The point isn’t to replace the people who answer your phone. It’s to make sure that when they do pick up, it’s a call that needs them.
What it costs, worked from your own log
The AI Receptionist is £10 a month plus 12.5p per minute for the calls it handles. You only pay the per-minute rate when it’s actually on a call, so your call log tells you roughly what you’d pay.
| Example from a call log | Monthly cost |
|---|---|
| Monthly charge | £10.00 |
| 120 routine calls a month, averaging 2 minutes each = 240 minutes at 12.5p | £30.00 |
| Total | £40.00 |
If your log shows fewer routine calls, say 50 calls at 2 minutes (100 minutes), the total would be £10 plus £12.50, so £22.50 a month. Use your own figures and the same sum: £10 plus minutes handled multiplied by 12.5p.
What not to hand over
Being straight about this matters. Keep people on the calls where judgement, empathy or negotiation count:
- Complaints and unhappy customers
- Difficult news or sensitive conversations
- Large or complex sales enquiries
- Anything your log shows is genuinely unpredictable
A good setup handles the predictable calls well and hands everything else to a human quickly. That’s how we design it.
The bottom line
Nobody can tell you what share of your calls is routine without looking. Your call log can show you the real figure in a week. If it shows that a large share of your team’s phone time goes on the same few questions, that’s time you can hand back to the conversations that bring in revenue.
Done your call log? Let’s look at it together
Share your week’s results with us and we’ll tell you honestly which calls AI could handle, which it shouldn’t, and what it would cost. No jargon, no obligation.
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