Office hours are usually 8-4 or 9-5. Phones keep ringing outside them too — evenings, weekends, lunch breaks. Businesses deal with this in two ways: paying for overtime, or simply losing those calls. There's a third option.
What reception overtime actually costs
Overtime work typically comes with a premium — commonly 50% or 100% on top of the hourly rate, depending on when it falls. If the illustrative cost of employing a receptionist is around 5,500 PLN a month (salary plus employer contributions), the effective hourly rate (at roughly 168 working hours a month) works out to about 33 PLN/hour — and overtime costs noticeably more once the premium is added.
A worked example
10 hours of overtime a month (covering evenings and part of Saturday), at a 50% premium:
~500 PLN extra per monthThat's roughly 6,000 PLN a year — just for extending phone coverage, not counting the base salary itself.
What the AI Assistant offers instead
A Voice AI Assistant answers calls 24 hours a day, 7 days a week — there's no concept of "overtime", because there's no fatigue, no shifts, no working-time limits to manage. The Standard plan costs 99 PLN/month (1,000 minutes included), Premium 199 PLN/month (no minute limit) — regardless of what time a customer calls.
A direct comparison
- Reception overtime: the extra cost scales with hours worked outside standard time, requires scheduling, and still doesn't cover the full 24 hours.
- AI Assistant: a fixed, predictable monthly cost, independent of time of day — 3am costs exactly the same as 3pm on a Wednesday.
It doesn't have to be either/or
In practice, the best setup is a combination: your team handles calls during standard hours (with harder cases transferred live via the mobile app if needed), and the AI Assistant takes over everything outside them — evenings, weekends, holidays — without having to schedule overtime or find someone willing to work inconvenient hours.
Covering the full day doesn't have to mean any overtime at all — it can mean one fixed, predictable amount every month.
Where this makes the biggest difference
Industries with an uneven call pattern throughout the day — restaurants (evening bookings), emergency services (calls at any hour), beauty and healthcare (customers calling after their own work day ends) — gain the most from matching phone availability to when their customers actually call, not just to standard office hours.
When you calculate the real cost of after-hours phone coverage, it's worth comparing not just overtime pay, but the cost of the calls nobody answered at all.
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