AI voice agents, chatbots and messaging for UK businesses

Nobody should have to ring twice

Phone, website live chat, WhatsApp and SMS, all answered in seconds by one assistant that knows your prices, your diary and your services. It books the job, writes it up, and passes the conversations worth having straight to your team.

★★★★★5.0 across 52 Google reviews
The nine o’clock enquiries stop getting awayMost people who cannot get through do not leave a message, they ring the next firm on the list. This one picks up in under two seconds, seven days a week.
It books the job, it does not take a messageReal availability from your live diary, prices from your rate card, written straight into your CRM or custom system ready for the morning.
Your team get the conversations that are worth their timeQualified, written up and handed over. Pricing, complaints and anything contractual go to a person on purpose, not by accident.
Let’s deal with this first

Most chatbots are terrible.
That is a build problem, not an AI problem.

You have met the one that loops you through four menus, refuses to say a price, and only offers you a person once you have typed HUMAN in capitals twice. Almost all of that irritation comes from three build decisions, and all three are optional.

The one you have met
SophieCustomer Advisor · online nowNo such person
A photo, a name, a job title and a little green dot, all of it invented. It collects details before it gives anything back. Dead ends. Helen closes the tab and rings the garage down the road, and nobody at this one ever knows she was there.
The one we build
MGMarshall’s GarageAI assistantanswers instantly, 24 hours
Answers first, asks second. It gives a real number before it wants anything, and when it does ask for something it asks for one thing, the registration, and says exactly why. That is the difference: the other one collects details to hold her hostage, this one collects a detail to save her a second trip. Helen books without speaking to anyone, and Ryan gets a job in the diary he never had to chase.
Same question, same second. Watch where each one goes.

The three things that make people hate chatbots: pretending to be human, withholding the answer until it has your details, and hiding the way out. We take all three off the table before anything gets built.

The switchboard Simulated

Simulated examples,
so you can see it for yourself.

Pick a business closest to yours and watch a real enquiry play out. You get both halves at once: what the customer sees, and what the system quietly did about it. The businesses, callers and prices are invented. The behaviour is exactly what we build. Interrupt it whenever you like.

1Closest business to yours

2How it comes in

3When

DemoSat 21:47Incoming

Behind it 0 actions

Nothing yet. It starts in a second.

The scenarios are invented, but they are built on the enquiries these trades genuinely get, and the prices show how a system quotes from a rate card you control rather than making numbers up. Voice runs on ElevenLabs for speech and Twilio for the telephony, wired into whatever you already use.

And then it keeps going

The booking is not the end of it

This is the part that pays for itself and the part everyone forgets. The conversation carries on for weeks, and it moves to whichever channel that person actually reads.

Four front doors

Four front doors,
one thing behind them.

Most businesses only need two channels to start with, and which two depends entirely on how your customers already behave. Whether it is an AI voice agent picking up the phone or an AI chatbot answering on the website, the same knowledge and the same rules sit behind it, so nobody gets a different answer depending on the door they walked through.

Comes in on

PhoneAnswered in under two seconds, any hour. The call at seven on a Friday that would have gone elsewhere.
Website live chatKnows which page they are on. For the researcher comparing three firms who is not ready to speak to anyone.
WhatsAppPhotos, quotes, and a thread that picks up weeks later. For anything needing a picture, and reviving quotes that went quiet.
SMSTwo-way, no app, opened in minutes. For cutting no-shows, and customers who will never install anything.

One assistantOne rate card, one diary, one set of rules
Comes out as

A slot held in your live diaryNot a message for someone to action
A job written into your systemWith the whole conversation attached
A follow-up already scheduledOn the channel that person reads
Or a handover to (your team member)Priced, qualified, nothing to repeat

And the same five rules, on every single conversation

Answers the question asked before it asks for anything back
Quotes only from your rate card, and never improvises a number
Three sentences maximum, unless somebody asks for detail
Hard stop and fetch a human on price negotiation, complaints, anything clinical or contractual, or the moment somebody asks
Says it does not know rather than guessing, and says so plainly

The handover is not a fallback for when it fails. It is a designed outcome, triggered by rules you agree and sign off in writing before anything goes live.

Email sits alongside these for anything that needs a paper trail.

What it replaced

Against the usual ways of covering the phones

Most businesses are already paying for some version of an AI answering service, whether they call it that or not. The question is usually not whether to spend the money, it is what the money currently buys.

Receptionist Call answering service Live chat operator AI assistant
Typical annual cost £26,000 to £31,000 all in £1,800 to £7,200 by volume £3,000 to £9,000 £3,290 in year one for messaging, £6,890 for messaging and phone, build included
Hours covered a year About 1,684 productive hours Often office hours only Office hours 8,760 hours, no sickness, no cover to arrange
Knows your prices Yes, once trained No, takes a message Usually a script Quotes from your rate card, refuses to go beyond it
Books into your diary Yes Rarely Sometimes Yes, live availability, and writes the job up too
Handles four at once No Yes, at extra cost Two or three at a push No practical limit
Follows up two weeks later If someone remembers No No Every time, on the channel that person reads
Handles an angry customer Yes, and in most scenarios better than any other system No Poorly No emotion of its own to trigger, so it stays level and de-escalates as it goes, then hands the conversation to a person rather than trying to finish it alone

Salary figures are UK market ranges for 2026 including employer national insurance and pension, not quotes. The 1,684 hour figure is a full-time role after holiday, sickness, training and breaks. The last row is there deliberately: there are things a person does better, and the build is designed around that rather than around pretending otherwise.

Is it worth it

We have no study to wave at you.
So here is the arithmetic instead.

Every agency selling AI voice agents and chatbots has a statistic. Most of them are somebody’s marketing survey. Put your own figures in the sentence below and see what your missed enquiries are actually worth, then decide whether it is worth a conversation.

200Everything that comes in: calls, forms, chats, messages.
£450A typical job, or a first order if they come back.
15%Rings out, arrives in the evening, sits in an inbox, voicemail nobody returns.0%40%
30%Your normal conversion rate. We use it as the odds on the ones you never answered.5%80%

Walking out of the door a year£48,600

This is your arithmetic, not a claim about results. It assumes an enquiry you never speak to is an enquiry you lose, which is close enough to true for phone calls and much less true for email. It also assumes we would catch all of them, and we would not. Treat it as the size of the problem rather than the size of the prize, and we will go through your real numbers properly on the call.

How we work

From missed calls to a front desk that never closes

No months of discovery and no strategy deck that sits in a drawer. Every stage ends with something you can hold, and your AI voice agent or chatbot is answering real enquiries inside month one.

1

Discovery

designbox AI voice discovery stage of the process

Two to three days of senior time inside your business. We go through your last hundred enquiries, where they came from, what they asked, what got missed and what time of day, then work out honestly what an AI should handle and what it should not go near.

A map of your inbound by channel, hour and outcome, including what the misses are costing
A draft rule set and handover policy, in plain English, that you sign off
The rate card the assistant will quote from, agreed line by line
Yours to keep whatever happens next, and it is part of the build rather than a separate fee
Week one of the build
2

Live on one channel, out of hours

designbox AI voice pilot launch stage of the process

We do not put it on your main line and hope. It goes live on the single channel discovery says matters most, outside business hours only, wired into your live diary and your system. Then we read every single transcript while it earns the right to do more.

Connected to your real diary, your rate card and your CRM or custom system
Every conversation recorded, transcribed and tagged with what happened at the end of it
A weekly tightening pass while the volume is low and the stakes are lowest
Your team trained on what lands on their desk and what to do with it
Inside the thirty day pilot
3

Widen it out

designbox AI voice expand channels stage of the process

With one channel proving itself on real numbers, we add the next. Voice usually comes after chat because it needs more testing on interruption, background noise and accents. Then the follow-up sequences, which is where most of the money actually is.

Additional channels, and business hours coverage once it has earned it
Follow-up sequences on the channel each customer actually reads
Deeper integrations, built as part of AI automation where they do not exist off the shelf
Volumes and outcomes reporting into an AI dashboard you can check any time
Typically 60 to 90 days
4

Run, read and improve

designbox AI voice monitor and improve stage of the process

Conversations drift. Prices change, you add a service, and somebody asks a question nobody predicted. Every month we go through the transcripts, find the ones where it should have done better, and fix them. That is the work, and it is why this sits in a retainer rather than being handed over as a finished object.

Monthly transcript review, with the failures shown to you rather than buried
A plain English report: what it handled, what it handed over, what we changed
One team training session every month
Full ownership of everything built, running on your own accounts, with no lock-in
Ongoing, and cancellable any month
What it costs

One build fee.
Then tick what you need.

No tiers to climb. If you only want AI phone answering, buy the phone. Every allowance is printed on the plan, and anything over it is charged by the minute or the message at a published rate. Prices exclude VAT and there is no minimum term after the build.

To build it£950

Discovery, build, and thirty days running on your real enquiries. We go through your last hundred enquiries, write the rules and the rate card with you, wire it into your diary and your system, then put it live on one channel out of hours only while we read every transcript.

If it has not earned its keep by the end of the thirty days, you walk away and there is nothing further to pay.

Messaging£195a month

Web chat, WhatsApp, SMS and email, all answered by the same assistant.

Unlimited web chat conversations and emails
300 texts a month
400 WhatsApp messages a month
Booking into your live diary, and follow-up sequences
Monthly transcript review and tuning
Phone£295a month

AI answering on your own number, day or night.

500 minutes a month, which is roughly 150 calls
Up to 3 numbers included, local, mobile or a mix
Warm transfer to your team when they are there
Recording, transcript and write-up on every call
Monthly transcript review and tuning
Most start hereEverything£495a month

Both of the above in one system, with bigger allowances. Saves £95 a month.

600 minutes a month, roughly 180 calls, and up to 3 numbers
500 texts and 600 WhatsApp messages
Unlimited web chat and email
A conversation can start on chat and finish on the phone
Fortnightly review, and an AI dashboard
Several branches?Up to30% offeach extra location

Multiple branches, brands or trading names get a custom quote. Web chat and the knowledge behind it are shared across sites, so you are not paying twice for the same thing. What actually scales is call minutes, numbers and separate diaries, so that is all we price.

Tell us how many sites and roughly how many calls each and we will put a figure on it the same day. Ask for a quote.

What happens if we go over?

You pay for what you use, itemised on the invoice, at these rates. Nothing is rounded up and there is no bundle you have to buy to get back under.

Phone, per minute 25p Billed by the minute, not per call, so a thirty second call costs thirty seconds
Text, per message 7p Per 160 characters. We keep templates short so they stay as one
WhatsApp, per message 6p Only messages we start. Anything inside a 24 hour reply window is free
Web chat and email Included However many, on every plan

Phone numbers. Up to three are included on any plan with phone, in any mix of local and mobile. Extra ones, or a freephone number, are charged as below.

Local, 01 or 02 £6 A month. Calls at the standard 25p a minute
Mobile, 07 £6 A month. Calls at the standard 25p a minute
Freephone, 0808 £15 A month, and 45p a minute, because you are paying for the caller’s call. Calls from mobiles cost the most

A local number is what we recommend for almost everybody. It is the cheapest to run, people trust a number that looks like it is near them, and it can send and receive texts. Freephone numbers cannot do SMS at all in the UK, so if you want 0808 on the front of your van you will still need a local or mobile number behind the messaging.

We tell you when you reach 80% of an allowance, and you can move plan any month with no penalty. If your usage is consistently over, we will say so and move you rather than quietly billing the difference.

What is in the 25p a minute?

The AI itself, the call minutes, live transcription, the recording and its storage, writing the job into your system, and the confirmation text afterwards.

For comparison, a traditional call answering service charges £1.50 to £2.50 to take a message and hand it back to you to deal with.

What else might we need?

Most businesses need none of these, and we will tell you if you do rather than putting them in the quote by default.

A bespoke or premium voice £95 a month. An additional language £45 a month. Outbound reactivation campaigns, quoted per campaign. A non-standard CRM or diary integration, from £950 as a one-off.

Those rates are published, the same for every client, and printed on your invoice. There is a margin in them and we are not going to pretend otherwise, but they are a long way below what the per-minute resellers charge and they are the only usage lines you will ever see from us. If our own costs move we give you thirty days’ notice before the rate does. If you are already on an AI retainer with us, the build comes out of your retainer time and you pay the monthly only.

The bit everyone worries about

Recordings, data and what happens if you leave

Voice and messaging touch more personal data than most AI work, so here are the answers before you have to ask for them.

You own everything we build

The rule set, the rate card, the conversation flows and the integrations are yours, not licensed back to you
Your phone number, your WhatsApp sender, your accounts. Nothing routes through ours
Every recording, transcript and lead stays in your systems and is exportable
If you leave, you keep the lot and we hand it over documented

No lock-in and no hostage-taking. If we are worth keeping, it will be because the work is good.

Recordings, consent and disclosure

Cyber Essentials Plus certified, and a decade of handling client systems
Callers are told the call is recorded and that they are speaking to an AI, in the opening line
Retention periods, lawful basis and your privacy notice wording are agreed during the build, not afterwards
Model and processing arrangements covered in writing before anything touches live data

We do not clone a real member of staff’s voice. It undercuts the disclosure, creates a consent problem the day that person leaves, and makes people feel misled when they find out.

Good questions

AI voice and chat,
answered honestly

The worries first, then the practical questions. Can’t see yours? Ask us anything on a quick call, no obligation.

It will annoy my customers
It will if it is built to stall them. Nearly all the irritation people feel comes from three specific behaviours: pretending to be a person, refusing to answer until it has your email, and hiding the exit. We take all three off the table on day one. What we hear back is rarely “it was a bot”, it is “why did you not have this sooner”, because somebody got a straight answer at half nine on a Sunday.
It will say something wrong and cost me
This is the fair worry, and it is why we do not let it improvise on anything that matters. Prices come from a rate card you maintain. Availability comes from your live diary. Job status comes from your system. Anything clinical, contractual, legal or a complaint is a hard stop that fetches a human no matter how confidently it could have answered. It is allowed to say it does not know, and it does that far more readily than most people would.
Why does it have to admit it is an AI?
Three commercial reasons, before we get anywhere near the ethics. It converts better. Once somebody knows what they are speaking to, they ask shorter, clearer questions and stop testing it, so more conversations reach a booking. It protects your reputation. The damage is not being an AI, it is somebody realising afterwards that they were misled by a business they were about to pay. It is heading towards a legal requirement. Disclosure rules for automated voice and chat are tightening in the UK and EU, and retrofitting honesty later costs more than building it in now.
It will get in the way of the sale
Only if you point it at the sale, and we do not. Its job is answering, qualifying, booking and following up. The moment a conversation becomes a real sales conversation, a negotiation, a spec discussion, an unhappy customer or a valuable returning client, it stops and hands over with the context already written up. Your team spend more time on those conversations, not less, because they are no longer also fielding “what time do you open”.
It will be another thing I have to look after
It is a thing that needs looking after and we are not going to pretend otherwise. Prices change, services change, and people ask things nobody predicted. That is why it sits inside a retainer rather than being handed over as a finished object. We read the transcripts, find the conversations where it should have done better, and fix them. You get a monthly note on what it handled, what it passed on, and what we changed.
Will it work with my phone system and my CRM?
Usually yes. It sits on a number that can be your existing one ported across or a new one that forwards, so nothing changes for the people who already have your number. On the data side it writes into whatever you run, whether that is a mainstream CRM or a custom system we have built you. Where a connection does not exist off the shelf, we build it, which is what AI automation covers.
What happens if it does not understand someone?
It asks once, plainly. If it is still stuck it stops trying and moves to a human, either a transfer if somebody is there or a callback with everything it did understand written up. It never loops. A conversation that goes round twice is treated as a failure and gets flagged in the monthly review so we can fix the gap underneath it.
How do I know it is not losing me work?
Every conversation is recorded, transcribed and tagged with what happened at the end: booked, handed over, answered, abandoned. That feeds an AI dashboard you can look at any time, and we go through it with you monthly. The out of hours soft launch exists precisely so you can see real numbers on traffic you were previously missing entirely, before it touches anything in business hours.
Can it handle WhatsApp properly, or is it a form in disguise?
Properly. It runs on the WhatsApp Business Platform, so it can send and receive photos and documents, use approved templates where WhatsApp requires them, and hold a real threaded conversation that picks up again weeks later. The nudge a fortnight after a quote is often the highest value thing it does, and WhatsApp is where people actually read it.
Can it use my own voice, or a cloned one?
Technically yes, and we advise against it for an assistant answering your phones. It undercuts the disclosure, it creates a consent problem if that person ever leaves, and it makes people feel misled when they find out. We pick a natural voice that sounds like it belongs to your business without pretending to be a specific member of staff.
What about accents, mumbling and background noise?
This is the honest limit of voice. It handles most UK regional accents and a noisy van fine, and it copes with being interrupted mid-sentence, which matters more than people expect. It struggles the same places a person on a bad line struggles. When it does, it says so and moves to a human rather than guessing, and that behaviour is the thing we test hardest before it takes a real call.
Do we have to tell people it is an AI?
We build it that way as standard and we would argue with you if you wanted it hidden. Beyond the trust argument, disclosure rules for automated voice and chat are tightening in the UK and EU, and retrofitting honesty later costs more than building it in now. It also measurably improves the conversations, because people ask clearer questions once they know what they are talking to.
How quickly will it be live?
Chat and WhatsApp are usually two to three weeks. Voice is nearer four, because it needs more testing on interruption, noise and accents before it goes anywhere near a real caller. We will not rush voice onto your main line, it does more damage than having no system at all.
Do we need a new phone number?
No. We can port your existing number across, or put a new one in front of it that forwards, so nothing changes for the people who already have your number. Up to three numbers are included on any plan with phone answering, in any mix of local and mobile, which means nobody ever gets an engaged tone. Local numbers are what we recommend for almost everybody: cheapest to run, and people trust a number that looks local. Freephone 0808 numbers are available at £15 a month and 45p a minute, since you are paying for the caller’s call, and they cannot send or receive texts in the UK, so you would still need a local number behind the messaging.
What does it cost?
£950 to build it, which includes discovery and thirty days running on your real enquiries. After that it is £195 a month for messaging, £295 for phone answering, or £495 for both, excluding VAT and with no minimum term. Each plan has printed allowances, and anything over them is 25p a minute on the phone, 7p a text and 6p a WhatsApp message. Full breakdown on the pricing section.
Can it do outbound as well as inbound?
Follow-ups, reminders, confirmations and reactivating quotes that went quiet, yes, and that is usually where the return is. Cold outbound calling is a different thing, it is heavily regulated, and it is not something we build. If that is what you are after we are the wrong agency and we would rather say so now.
Next step

Let’s find out what you are missing

We will go through your last month of enquiries with you and tell you honestly which ones an AI should have handled and which ones it definitely should not. Thirty minutes, no hard sell, and an honest answer either way.

Rather check us out first? Ask an AI what it makes of us

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