61% of small business owners are stressed by being reachable

How much stress does being reachable cause?

61 percent of small and medium business decision makers experience direct stress because customers expect to be helped immediately. That comes from research carried out by KPN in June 2026 among 819 decision makers in Dutch small and medium businesses.

On top of that, 54 percent feel pressure to be constantly available, and 53 percent say phone availability comes at the cost of their employees' concentration.

That last figure is the most interesting one. The problem is not that the phone rings. The problem is that it rings while someone is in the middle of something else.

Why this bites now

Being reachable has always been work. What changed is that there are fewer people to do it. If you want to weigh providers side by side, use our buyer's guide to comparing AI phone assistants.

According to Statistics Netherlands, 64 percent of businesses are affected by staff shortages. In April 2026 the majority of those businesses said they were turning to automation to cope. Staff shortage is currently the single biggest barrier to growth for smaller companies.

Meanwhile customer expectations have not scaled back. People used to a reply within a minute from a large retailer apply that same yardstick to a heating engineer with eight staff.

The result is a widening gap: expectations rise, staffing falls. The difference lands on the people who are still there, and that is exactly what the 61 percent measures.

The hidden cost of a ringing phone

A missed call might cost you a customer. That is visible, and businesses manage for it.

An answered call costs you something nobody measures: the twenty minutes someone needs to get back into whatever they were doing. At five interruptions a day that is nearly two hours of productive time, every day, per person.

That is what the 53 percent is really saying. Not that phone calls are annoying, but that the interruption costs more than the conversation.

And here is the painful detail: a large share of those interruptions are about questions nobody needed to ask. Opening hours, delivery times, whether you cover a particular area, whether something is still under warranty.

What business owners already expect from AI

The striking thing about the KPN research is that owners have already worked out the answer.

Sixty percent believe AI makes it possible to be reachable around the clock without hiring extra staff. Sixty-six percent expect AI to take over part of their customer contact and reduce workload.

That is no longer cautious curiosity. That is a majority naming the solution.

And yet 82 percent still do not use AI strategically or structurally. More than half do not use it at all, or only ad hoc on the initiative of one individual employee.

The gap between knowing and doing

Sixty-six percent expect AI to reduce workload. Eighty-two percent are doing nothing structural with it. Those two numbers together are the real story in this research.

The reason is usually not doubt about the technology. It is uncertainty about where to start, plus a fair worry that a half-working chatbot will irritate customers more than it helps them.

That is a genuine risk. An AI agent that invents generic answers, or routes every question to a form, is worse than no agent at all.

The difference lies in the source. An agent answering from your own website, prices and terms gives answers that are correct. An agent drawing on a general model is guessing.

Where to actually start

Start with your most common questions, not your hardest ones. Spend a week writing down what people call and chat about. In most businesses, 60 to 80 percent of it covers a handful of recurring topics.

Automate those first. That is the part with the least doubt and the most time saved.

Make sure handover to a human is always possible, with context attached. The customer who does need a person should not have to start again. That is the difference between automation that helps and automation that annoys.

Watch out-of-hours separately. That is where the biggest gain sits, because right now nobody picks up at all. AI telephony that catches the question in the evening and books an appointment costs you nothing in broken concentration.

Calm is the real result

Most stories about AI in customer contact are about speed and cost. This research points at something else: it is about calm.

If 61 percent of owners feel stressed by being reachable and 53 percent lose their concentration to it, the gain is not just a smaller phone bill. The gain is a working day in which you can finish a job.

Want to know what that looks like for your business? Try Heyloha free for 14 days and see how much of your inbound gets resolved on its own. No credit card, cancel monthly.

Frequently asked questions about availability and workload