Intake does not arrive during business hours. It arrives after an accident, after a diagnosis, after a deadline letter lands, and the organisation that answers is the one that gets the work. An answering service takes a message. A message is not an intake.
The outbound side is worse because it is invisible. The calls that never get made are the ones with no deadline attached: the check in that would have caught a problem early, the record request that has been sitting for three weeks, the claim that could have been opened on Monday and was opened on Friday. Nobody is failing. There are simply not enough hours.
And the phone is the one channel most AI never sees. A firm can index every document it holds and still have no idea what was agreed on a call, which means the assistant answering questions about a file is answering from an incomplete file.