The calls your small business is missing are costing more than you think

By Arsalan Kamran, CEO and co-founder of AssistRing

Here is a test worth running this week. Go into your phone system and pull the number of calls that rang out unanswered in the last 30 days. Not voicemails left. Calls nobody picked up.

For most small businesses I talk to, the number is higher than the owner expected, and it clusters in exactly the hours when the business is busiest. Lunch rush. End of the working day. The Monday after a holiday weekend.

Then work out what one customer is worth to you over a year, and multiply.

That is usually the moment the conversation about outsourcing customer support gets serious.

Why small businesses assume this is not for them

Outsourcing has a reputation problem at the small end of the market, and some of it is deserved.

Most call centers are built for volume. Their pricing, onboarding and account management all assume you are bringing at least 20 seats. Call one as a company with 15 employees and you will either get quoted something absurd or politely ignored. So owners conclude outsourcing is a big company thing and go back to answering the phone between customers.

The second reason is worse, and it is the fear of sounding cheap. Everyone has been on the end of a call with somebody clearly reading a script who does not understand the business and cannot help. No owner wants that for their customers, and that fear alone keeps a lot of businesses answering their own phones long past the point where it makes sense.

Both concerns are reasonable. Neither is a good reason to keep losing calls.

What I would actually ask

I run a BPO, so treat this section with appropriate suspicion. But these are the questions I would ask from the other side of the table, and some of them disqualify us as easily as anyone else.

What is the real minimum? Ask for the smallest engagement they will take, in agents, not seats or hours. If the answer is 20, you are not their customer and the account will be neglected. We start at two agents, full time. There are others who go small too. Find them.

Who employs the agent? This one sounds like paperwork and is not. Ask whether the provider legally employs the people on your account, or whether they are a staffing agency, an employer of record, or a marketplace passing contractors along. When something goes wrong, that distinction decides whether you have one company accountable or three companies pointing at each other. We employ our agents directly.

Do you get dedicated people? Ask whether you get named agents working only on your account or a shared pool handling six businesses at once. Shared pools are cheaper and they sound exactly like what you are afraid of.

How do they check quality? Almost nobody asks this, and it predicts how the relationship goes better than anything else. The standard answer across the industry is that a supervisor reviews a small sample each week, which in practice means one to three percent. Ask what percentage of calls actually get reviewed, and watch how comfortable they are with the question.

What happens in month three? Everybody performs in month one. Ask what the reporting looks like once launch attention fades, and ask to see a real report from an existing account with the client details removed.

Can you leave? Read the notice period before you read the pricing.

The quality question, and why I keep pushing on it

When we started AssistRing in 2024, what struck me was how comfortable this industry is with not knowing. Support teams run on averages built from tiny samples, and the calls that actually damage a business almost never land in the sample.

A customer told the wrong return policy. A caller who got frustrated, stayed polite, hung up and quietly never came back. Those calls do not generate complaints. They generate a slow leak that shows up months later as a number nobody can explain.

Every BPO will tell you they care about quality, then hand you a report built on two percent of the calls. That never sat right with me, so we built ARIS, the intelligence layer that runs across every account we handle.

Sage is the part that answers this problem. It scores 100 percent of calls instead of a sample, every day, against criteria you set. Alongside it, Edith handles live translation across more than 100 languages so language is not a barrier on the call. Agent Copilot surfaces the right answer to the agent while the customer is still on the line. VOX handles the routine enquiries that do not need a person and hands off to a human the moment one does. A human stays in the loop across all of it.

For a small business the benefit is not the technology. It is that you can see what is happening on your phone line without personally listening to it, which is the only version of this that works when you are also running the business.

What good looks like at small scale

Royal Nawaab is one of the largest Pakistani hospitality groups in the UK and one of our earliest accounts. Seven agents handle over 900 calls a day there, with average handle time between one and two minutes and most of the team at 97 to 98 percent customer satisfaction. Calls come in across Hindi, Urdu, Punjabi and English, often switching mid-conversation. Their verified Clutch review documents a call drop rate that fell from 40 percent to under 3 percent after we took over.

Seven people covering that volume is the point. It is not a large team. It works because the agents are not writing call notes by hand, not searching for answers while the customer waits, and not blocked when a caller switches language. The work a machine does better has been taken off their plate, and what is left is the conversation.

That structure scales down. A two agent team running the same way covers far more than two people answering phones the conventional way.

When you should not outsource

There are situations where I would tell you not to do this.

If your volume is genuinely low, under roughly 20 calls a day, and you are handling it without missing any, keep handling it. You will not save money and you will add coordination overhead.

If your product is complex enough that answering a question requires judgement no process can capture, start with a part time person you can train directly rather than an outsourced team.

If you have not written down what a good customer interaction looks like for your business, do that first. Outsourcing an undefined process just moves the confusion somewhere you cannot see it. This is the most common reason these relationships fail, and it is almost always the client's side of the failure rather than the vendor's.

Where we fit

AssistRing is a managed BPO with registered entities in the United States and Germany and our delivery team in Karachi, Pakistan. We handle customer support for businesses across the US and UK in hospitality, ecommerce, healthcare, staffing, retail and SaaS. Alongside Royal Nawaab, we run order and returns management for AmazeWholesale and candidate intake for Locum Smart, a UK healthcare staffing firm.

We take accounts starting at two full time agents, we employ those agents ourselves, and ARIS is included at every size. There is no tier where full quality coverage becomes a paid upgrade. We cover voice, email, live chat, social and back office work, including after-hours and weekend cover.

Every BPO founder says something like this, so I will keep it plain. If you are losing calls and you want to know what your phone line actually sounds like, that is a conversation worth having, whether or not it ends with us.

Arsalan Kamran is the CEO and co-founder of AssistRing, a managed BPO providing customer support and call center services for businesses in the United States and United Kingdom. More at assistring.com, the ARIS suite at assistring.com/aris, and client work at assistring.com/portfolio.