By Peter Lyle DeHaan, PhD
Who doesn’t love it when something’s free? A free ticket to a game, a free bucket of popcorn—it’s great! But what about a free trial? Now, that’s trickier. To most people, it’s a double edged-sword: great while it lasts, but often leaves you with a bill you didn’t expect to pay for. And it’s no different with answering services.
As a company that has been answering the phones for thousands of businesses since 1932, we’ve seen the trends of the industry as they come and go. One that’s seemed to stay, is the offer of a “free trial”. The rationale is this:
“I want an answering service for my business, but I don’t know if I’m totally ready to commit to this answering service; it would be great if I could just give it a test drive.”
As an answering service provider, we know the truth behind the curtain. Let’s take a closer look at why those “free trials” aren’t the incredible deal they’re made out to be.
What’s the Answering Service’s Strategy In Offering a Free Trial?
Think of a time you took up a free trial for a service, like a streaming service. Let’s say you’re like me and entirely forgot you even took up the free trial and missed the deadline to cancel it. Now you’ve got a bill of $10 for the next month.
You think, “Well since I’m already paying for this month, I might as well make use of it and watch some of the shows on here before I cancel it”.
(If you’re like me, you don’t end up watching any of their shows—and you forget to cancel…again).
So, when you get hit with a second bill for $10, you decide “That’s enough, I’m cancelling it now!”
As you can see, what you initially thought was going to be free, has passively cost you $20. That’s not quite a 1:1 comparison with answering services, as you would be using it regularly for your business, but you get the idea.
In this great free trial study by Whop, they found that a 30-day free trial yielded a 32% opt-in rate and a whopping 56% conversion rate. (If you’re like me, they also studied the data for 3, 7, and 14-day free trials and the results are very interesting).
In short, free trials make money. If they didn’t, no business would be offering them.
But, how will they recover this lost cost? There are two ways of doing this. One is charging more for setup and programming, hopefully enough to more than offset your free trial. Another is to charge you more in your monthly base rate or usage fees once the trial is over.
Ultimately, they know inertia will likely keep you there when the answering service trial period ends. It takes effort to change services and you just switched once, so they know you are unlikely to do it again—even if their service isn’t as good as they promised.
“So what if they expect to make money off of me? I’ll just be extra sure to cancel it before payment’s due! There’s no other catch, right?”
Unfortunately, there is— and it’s in the quality of service you receive.
Answering Services that Offer Free Trials Don’t Prioritize Customer Service Quality
That’s a bold statement, but it’s true! However, before we get into that, we have to take a step back and get into how answering services are set up.
Programming an Answering Service Costs Money
Any answering service requires programming your information into their software. Why? So that the answering service agents know what to ask from your callers to gather the necessary information for you to follow-up with them. There are obviously more use cases to an answering service, but we’ll keep it simple here with gathering lead information and following up.
Now, to program all of this information takes time. Answering services that offer “instant set-ups”—you guessed it—are skipping this level of personalization to your service. The time it takes to program your information is an involved process. A good answering service will be working with you to create questions, escalation protocols, and begin importing contacts.
Programming is very important as it can dramatically reduce the length of your calls. Why does that matter? If you’re asking redundant questions, not only are you wasting your callers time, you’re also wasting your phone’s minutes. And those wasted minutes on the phone means more dollars to the answering service.
Programming is only one of two parts in the set-up process. The second? Training.
Training Call Center Agents to Handle Your Calls Costs Money
Another red flag in a free trial offer has to do with training. Training call center agents to handle your calls takes time – and time costs money.
Let’s say your answering service has all your information from programming—great. Now they need to train their agents to be able to handle your calls. Think questions like:
“How should they pronounce my company’s name?”
If they don’t have enough time to be trained on the details of your account, think about the experience your callers will receive!
If an answering service is offering a free trial, they’re simply not prioritizing great customer service for your callers.
So, are “Free Trials” Really Free?
In short, no. As stated above, it tends to cost you in terms of service quality one way or the other. If you then decide to opt out, you might find yourself in a bind.
The answering service knows that on average you will stay with them for a couple of years. This is what we typically hear from those who have moved from other telephone answering services. Anyway, this usually gives them time to earn back what they spent during your free trial period—they may even come out ahead!
How Can You Find a Reliable Answering Service?
While some professional answering services may legitimately offer a truly free trial, it always calls for careful scrutiny. In reality, if their service is great, the answering service wouldn’t need to offer you a free trial.
Instead select a professional answering service that values their work and doesn’t devalue it (or you) by giving it away for free.
You can learn more in our blog about the 7 tips to choose an answering service.
You may also find our blog on how much the average answering service costs in 2025.
Article Submitted by Andrew Charles, Marketing Manager at AMBS Call Center