The missed call: getting AI Receptionist right for your business
Considering an AI Receptionist? Learn how to plan, set up and manage AI call handling effectively, with practical guidance to help your business avoid common pitfalls.
What you get
Understand which calls AI can handle, when a caller should be transferred to a person, and where to set clear boundaries.
How it works
Successful AI call handling depends on the information, rules and escalation paths you put in place from day one.
What to check
Review unanswered questions, escalation routes and customer interactions regularly to identify improvements and reduce risk.
What you get
Understand which calls AI can handle, when a caller should be transferred to a person, and where to set clear boundaries.
How it works
Successful AI call handling depends on the information, rules and escalation paths you put in place from day one.
What to check
Review unanswered questions, escalation routes and customer interactions regularly to identify improvements and reduce risk.
Every call answered, even when you can’t pick up: a virtual receptionist for your businesses
The phone rings...
The phone rings at 12.30pm. You’re in a meeting, the rest of the team is at lunch and the call goes to voicemail. You pick up the message at 2pm, if the caller left one at all. By then, the enquiry may have gone elsewhere.
AI Receptionist can help
An AI Receptionist can handle everyday calls so you can focus on more valuable work. It answers common questions, routes callers, takes messages and books appointments, while keeping a record of calls to help you understand what customers need.
The way you set it up matters.
Like any piece of new technology, the way you set it up matters. If you’re considering an AI Receptionist, here’s a helpful guide to make sure it will work the way your business needs it to.
Step 1: Decide what it will and won’t handle
AI Receptionist works best when it has one clear job: answering the calls you would otherwise miss. You can set it up to handle things such as opening hours, directions, bookings and messages. But it’s just as important to decide when it should pass things on to a human: requests for advice, pricing discussions, complaints, or when customers specifically ask to speak to someone. We call this a ‘never’ list, and it’s a good idea to have it written down and tested before you go live. You can always add to it as you learn what callers ask.
Step 2: Decide what it works from
An AI Receptionist is as good as the information you give it, and it answers only from that. Start with the information you already publish: services, opening hours, locations and contact details. It can learn these details from the pages of your website you share with it, and you can upload additional documents too. Leave out client names and any information you wouldn’t normally share with someone calling your front desk.
Step 3: Make it sound like you, and tell callers it’s AI
Think of AI Receptionist as an extension of your front desk. It should represent your business in the same way a human would. Transparency is key too. Callers should also know they’re speaking to AI. Make sure it says so at the start, and that anyone who wants to speak to a person can do so straight away.
Step 4: Start small
You can decide whether AI Receptionist takes every call, or only the calls you'd otherwise miss. It makes sense to start with the times when calls are most likely to go unanswered, such as lunch breaks or outside working hours. Then expand from there as your confidence grows. Start with a limited use case, monitor performance closely and make sure you know how to switch it off before you ever need to.
Step 5: Have a human monitor it
Every call is recorded as a transcript, and some of what callers say may be confidential, so decide who in your business can access them. You don’t need to review every single one. But it’s worth keeping an eye on things for the first few weeks. AI Receptionist can show you what callers asked and what it couldn’t answer, so start there. Ask one person to check each day for questions it couldn’t answer, calls that should have been passed to a person, and anything it said that doesn’t sound right for your business. After that, periodic reviews are usually enough. Most issues point back to one of the earlier steps: add to what it knows, tighten topics it shouldn’t touch, or update who it can transfer calls to.
There are lots of valuable ways to use AI in your business, but it’s essential to understand what you can safely hand to AI, and what should stay with your colleagues.
If you're not sure what your business should hand to AI, and what should always stay with people, our AI guardrails are a simple starting point, with ready-to-use guidance for legal, accountancy, recruitment and consultancy businesses.
