By Mandie Hungarland, Chief Operating Officer, Dead Ringers
Research shows that 78% of future funeral home customers plan to check you out online before making arrangements*. That means by the time someone picks up the phone to call you, they’ve already done their homework. They’ve looked at your website, read a review and compared you to the firm down the street. The phone call isn’t their first impression of you — it’s their decision point.
Which makes what happens in that first conversation more consequential than most deathcare firm owners realize. And it’s exactly why the current conversation about AI answering services is missing something important.
The Problem Isn’t Whether You Answer
When a wave of AI answering services started marketing to funeral homes — promising 24/7 call coverage, reduced burnout and significant cost savings — we understood the appeal. Really. Answering every call matters. Missing a first call is costly. These tools solve a real problem.
But after more than a decade of mystery shopping deathcare firms across the country, evaluating their customer experience, Dead Ringers learned that answering the call and converting the call are two very different things. And right now, only half of that conversation is happening.
What Our Data Actually Shows
At Dead Ringers, we’ve evaluated thousands of first calls at funeral homes and cemeteries using our proprietary scoring algorithm built around one central question: does this interaction make a family feel heard, safe, and ready to move forward with you?
The results are, well, humbling.
On more than 65% of calls, no empathy is expressed at any point in the conversation. No condolences, not even a relational, humanizing statement.
Yikes.
On 33% of calls, the professional answering service never even asks whether a death has actually occurred. And when the call ends, 76% of callers don’t know what their next step is. There is no plan in place for an appointment or follow-up conversation. The caller is just left to fend for themselves — often in one of the most mentally and emotionally strenuous times of their life.
These aren’t edge cases. They’re the norm.
What we find, consistently, is that the calls families remember — the ones that earn loyalty and trust — share a handful of specific behaviors in the first 90 seconds:
- A genuine acknowledgment of the loss before any logistics are discussed.
- A pace that matches the caller’s emotional state — not scripted efficiency.
- Active listening cues that signal the funeral professional is present, not processing.
- A clear, calm next step offered without pressure.
None of these are tech features. All of them are trained behaviors.
A Fair Look at What AI Can — and Can’t — Do
The answer here isn’t to ignore technology. Research also shows that less than half of consumers give funeral homes top marks for technology-based products*, and the profession has real ground to make up on digital expectations broadly. Resisting technology wholesale is its own mistake.
AI answering services genuinely help with capturing after-hours calls that would otherwise go to voicemail, routing first notices efficiently, and reducing burnout for staff already managing active cases. For firms losing calls to unanswered phones, these tools can make a measurable difference.
But here’s the question we’d ask before signing on for an AI answering service: What happens after “hello”?
The companies pitching AI receptionists are measuring call capture rate. That is a metric. It is not the metric. The metric that matters is call conversion: of the calls you answer, how many become families you serve?
No AI, at any current level of sophistication, fully replicates what a trained funeral home staff member does in those first 60 seconds. It can be warm. It can be scripted to say the right things. But it cannot read the tremor in a daughter’s voice at 2 a.m. and know to slow down. That is a trained skill. A distinctly human skill.
What Grieving Families Actually Need
Here’s what a decade of customer experience research in deathcare has taught us about the people on the other end of your phone: They are not evaluating your services. They are looking for someone they can trust with the care of someone they love.
When someone calls a funeral home or cemetery for the first time, they’re generally not comparison shopping. They don’t want to be shopping. They’re afraid, exhausted and hoping someone will take the weight off their shoulders. The funeral professional who does that — who makes them feel genuinely seen in the first 60 seconds — wins the arrangement. Not the firm with the best package pricing or the most sophisticated technology. The firm with a staff member who showed up as a human being first.
The goal isn’t to choose between technology and training. It’s to use technology where it helps — and to make sure the humans on your phones are equipped to do the part technology can’t (or shouldn’t).
A Framework for Evaluating Any Phone Solution
Whether you’re considering an AI answering service, a traditional answering service, or evaluating your in-house team, here’s what we recommend measuring:
- First-acknowledgment time. How many seconds pass before the caller’s loss is acknowledged — not just confirmed? This single variable is one of the strongest predictors of arrangement conversion in our data.
- What you ask first. Are the first questions about the deceased’s name and location, or about how the family is holding up? The order matters more than most people realize.
- Pace alignment. Does the person — or system — on the phone match the caller’s emotional speed, or does it run ahead of them toward efficiency?
- Next-step clarity. Does the caller hang up knowing exactly what happens next, and feeling confident it’s handled? Our data shows 76% currently don’t — which means for most deathcare firms, this alone is a significant opportunity.
Any phone solution — human or AI — should be evaluated against these four criteria. If you don’t know how your current team scores, consider calling yourself to learn what your callers are experiencing. You may be surprised at what you find out.
The Bottom Line
AI answering services are solving a real problem: missed calls. But the bigger problem is calls that get answered and don’t convert.
When no empathy is expressed on nearly two-thirds of all calls, and three in four callers hang up not knowing what to do next, the technology in your phone system isn’t your most urgent issue. Your training program is.
The firms that commit to ongoing coaching and training — not a one-time workshop, but consistent, reinforced development — see an average of 27% more won revenue. That’s not a feature upgrade. That’s a behavior change.
Technology and training aren’t in competition — but they aren’t interchangeable, either. The funeral homes that will win the next decade are the ones that use both with intention and know the difference between them.
Mandie Hungarland is the chief operations officer at Dead Ringers, a customer experience training company dedicated to the deathcare profession. Dead Ringers offers mystery shopping evaluations, professional coaching and training, and HelloPhone, a proprietary phone platform built specifically for deathcare firms. Learn more at deadringers.co. You can reach Hungarland at mandie@deadringers.co.
 The Foresight Companies’ 2025 Consumer Behavior Study
Follow FuneralVision.com on LinkedIn.
Follow FuneralVision.com on X.
Follow FuneralVision.com on Facebook.
