AI chat or a live answering service — which makes more sense?
They catch different people. An answering service catches callers; chat catches the ones who were never going to phone. If you have to choose, choose the one that matches how your customers actually reach you.
An answering service is a person picking up your phone. It is good, it is well understood, and it costs accordingly — typically a per-minute rate that adds up fast in a busy month, and faster when the calls are long or the callers are not customers.
Chat catches a different population entirely: the person on your site at ten at night who would never ring a stranger to ask whether you do cabinets. That person is not in your call log and never will be, so the two do not compete for the same enquiries as much as the comparison suggests.
The honest weakness of chat is urgency. Somebody with water coming through the ceiling is going to call, and they should. What ours does in that case is take the details and the problem and get them to you immediately, which is better than a form and worse than a human answering the phone.
If most of your enquiries arrive by phone and you are missing calls, fix the phone first. If your analytics show real traffic and your phone is quiet, that gap is what chat is for.