Nobody has ever hung up the phone thinking "that answering service really understood my situation." At best, they hang up neutral. At worst, they hang up and call your competitor.
The problem isn't the script. It's that there is one.
Traditional answering services work from a script because the person taking the call has never worked at your firm and never will. They don't know your clients, your services, or the difference between a routine query and one that needs a partner on the phone within the hour. So they fall back on the only thing they can: a generic set of questions and a promise that "someone will call you back."
Clients can tell. They called with a specific problem - a tax deadline, a bookkeeping discrepancy, a question about a number on a report they don't understand - and they got a stranger reading from a card. It's the audio equivalent of being handed a leaflet when you asked a question.
What clients actually want
They want someone who knows their file. Failing that, they want someone who at least sounds like they work for the firm, asks the right follow-up questions, and gives them a clear next step instead of a vague promise.
That's a lower bar than it sounds. Clients aren't expecting the receptionist to solve their tax problem. They're expecting the call to feel like it happened inside your firm, not outside it.
Where this leaves you
Hiring a full-time in-house receptionist for call cover is expensive and hard to justify for the volume most accountancy practices handle. Outsourcing to a generic answering service is cheap but comes with the exact trust cost described above.
An AI receptionist built specifically for your firm sits between the two. It's briefed on your services, your tone, and your intake process the way a well-trained member of staff would be - so a client calling about a VAT return gets asked about VAT returns, not read a script written for a plumbing company. The call still gets handled by "Penelope," not a stranger with a headset in a call centre three time zones away.