Advertising runs around the clock, but the phone gets answered until six in the evening. Someone saw your ad, called at eight o’clock and nobody picked up. The money for the click is spent, there is no enquiry, and the customer went to whoever answered.
One large digital agency solved this problem by handing its night and weekend calls to a voice AI agent. A voice AI agent is a program that answers phone calls in natural speech, asks the caller questions and records the result of the conversation. Below we look at what exactly they did, why you shouldn’t trust the numbers in this story blindly, and what you can check in your own business in one evening, even if you don’t plan to install such an agent.
The story is described in an article dated 29 September 2026. It was written by Ringostat, the service that sells this agent, so it is the seller’s point of view. We checked the descriptions and Google’s help on 7 October 2026.
What the agency did
According to that article, the agency Netpeak did not want to lose enquiries outside working hours: from 18:00 to 09:00 Kyiv time and at weekends. During that time an AI assistant answers the calls. It finds out the request and offers to either leave a voice message or answer a few questions: the topic of the project, the region of promotion, the budget and the timeline for making a decision. In the morning a manager gets a structured enquiry instead of a missed number.
The headline figure: the agent brings 89 out of 100 enquiries to a ready-made lead. These are the service’s own words, and here is what is worth noticing in them.
Why these numbers deserve a closer look
It is unclear what the percentage is based on. The article does not say how many enquiries there were, over what period, or what exactly counts as a “ready lead”. That is not a sale. Most likely it means the conversation reached the end and the details were recorded, but the article gives no exact definition.
Another story from the same article. An online shop taught the agent to call customers who placed an order but did not pay. Out of 10,512 calls, in 7,686 cases (73.1%) the person confirmed they intended to pay. An intention, not a payment: how many of them actually paid is not in the article.
One more figure that is easy to misread. A company that sells technical equipment to businesses received 1,156 calls during working hours and 612 outside them in less than a month. By our own calculation, that is roughly every third call arriving at times when no managers are around. This is one company and the service’s data, so you cannot take it as a norm for your business. But the order of magnitude is telling: night-time calls may be no small matter.
We found no independent confirmation of these numbers: searching for them leads only to the service’s own materials. So treat them as a case, not as a guarantee.
Step 1. Count how many calls you miss
This is the most important step, and it is free. Open your call log: in your phone system or virtual switchboard app, in your mobile operator’s account or on the phone itself. See how many calls were missed in a week, at what hours and on which days, and whether anyone called back and how quickly.
Looking for this in Google Ads is pointless, and here is why. Google counts calls from ads using special Google forwarding numbers: according to Google’s help, they are available in a list of countries that includes Poland, while Ukraine is not on that list. So in a Ukrainian account you will not see missed calls: there are only clicks on the call button. From our practice, that is exactly why in reports we write “clicks on the number” rather than “calls”. Real calls can be seen with call tracking: a separate number for ads that counts calls and shows the missed ones.
Now estimate the losses. A hypothetical example from the same article: 20 missed calls a week, 37% of which would have become a deal, and an average order of 5,000 hryvnias (UAH). That comes to over 150,000 hryvnias a month that the business did not earn. This is an example, not a statistic. Put in your own numbers and multiply the weekly misses by four.
Step 2. See what your ads cost during the “dead” hours
Open Google Ads. In the Campaigns menu, select Ad schedule (the name as in Google’s help in English). A chart appears: choose the “Day and Hour” subtab and, in the “Clicks” drop-down, switch the metric to cost. You will see how much money went in the hours when nobody picked up the phone.
The obvious thought: if nobody answers at night, switch the ads off at night. Practitioners disagree here. Some advise turning off the hours and days with the lowest conversion rate and say this does not disrupt the campaign’s learning; still, they suggest looking at several months of data and adjusting for the niche. Others stress that for online shops, ads outside working hours often bring more enquiries through forms and missed calls than calls during working hours, so you need to compare all enquiries, not only answered calls. And call tracking services advise cutting impressions in hours without calls and claim a lower cost per qualified enquiry, but that is the seller’s number without independent verification.
What Google’s help says is only about the mechanics. If you set a schedule, ads show only on the days and at the hours you specify, the schedule follows your account’s time zone, and you can create up to six ad schedules per day. The help gives no recommended hours or percentages. From our practice: don’t limit ad display to your working hours until you have compared all enquiries by hour. An AI agent adds a third option: don’t switch the ads off at night, catch what they bring in.
Step 3. What to check before connecting an agent
Whether the agent says it is artificial intelligence. For people in the EU, Article 50 of the EU AI Act applies from 2 August 2026: systems that talk to people must be designed so that the person knows they are interacting with AI, unless that is obvious. According to the text of the Act, this duty lies with the provider of the system, but ask about it before connecting. This is not legal advice.
What exactly counts as an enquiry. Agree in advance: a name, the gist of the request, a phone number? Don’t count every call the agent answered as a lead in your ads: we wrote about false “leads” and duplicates in the article on three checks and in the checklist of website connections.
Who calls back in the morning and when. The agent only collects the enquiry. The customer is waiting for a person, so the first call in the morning should go to them. An enquiry that sits until lunchtime costs as much as a missed one.
What the agent actually says. Listen to recordings of the conversations: from our practice, 10–15 conversations are enough to see what the agent understands and where it gets confused. The service’s description includes example conversations by industry, which you can also listen to before connecting.
Who this may suit
An online shop, food delivery, a car service, a beauty salon: anyone who gets calls after closing or when everyone is busy. If step 1 shows you have almost no missed calls, you don’t need an agent. Something simpler will do: a message on the answering machine and a call back in the morning.
You can see how it looks in the service on the Ringostat AI Voice Agent page. According to its description, the agent receives and makes calls, holds a conversation based on your knowledge base, records the result and, if needed, transfers the call to a manager. Remember that this is the seller’s page: the numbers and promises on it need checking in the same way as described above.
Summary
Three things for one evening: count your missed calls by week and by hour; see in Google Ads how much money goes into hours with no answer; decide what to do about it: catch them with an agent, call back in the morning or change the ad schedule.
One big case with the seller’s numbers is not yet proof that it will work for you. But counting your own missed calls is worth doing in any case: it is the cheapest way to find out how much money you lose after six in the evening.
You can read how we set up advertising in the search advertising and advertising for local business sections.
Want a free audit of your Google Ads account? Send us a request — we will look at your account and tell you where the money goes, including in the hours when nobody picks up the phone.