Choosing an AI Receptionist for Your Business
The questions worth asking before you commit, and the answers that should make you walk away.
Most AI receptionist products demo well. A scripted demonstration tells you very little, because the interesting behaviour happens at the edges: the question nobody anticipated, the caller who mumbles, the price that changed last week. These are the questions that separate providers.
Where do the answers come from?
Ask to see exactly which documents the agent is allowed to answer from, and what happens when a question falls outside them. An agent restricted to your approved material will occasionally say it does not know. That is the correct behaviour, and it is far cheaper than a confident wrong answer about your pricing.
How quickly can you change it?
Prices change, staff leave, opening hours move at Christmas. Find out whether you can update the agent's knowledge yourself in minutes, or whether every change is a support ticket with a lead time.
What happens to your data?
- Where are recordings, transcripts and documents hosted?
- How long is each kept, and can you change that?
- Is your data used to train models, by the provider or by their suppliers?
- Is the subprocessor list published, and is a data processing agreement available without asking three times?
Warning: A vague answer here is an answer
If a provider cannot tell you plainly where your customers' conversations are stored and who else touches them, assume the arrangement is not one you would be comfortable explaining to a customer.
What does it actually cost to run?
Compare on your expected usage rather than headline price. Ask about setup fees, per-seat charges, minimum contract length, notice period, and what happens if you exceed your minutes. A plan that looks cheap and bills aggressively for overages is not cheap.
Can it do the thing you are actually buying it for?
Be specific. If the point is appointments, the agent must check live availability and book, not promise a callback. If the point is out-of-hours cover, ask how calls are routed and what the morning handover looks like. If the point is web chat, ask how long installation takes.
Tip: Test it yourself, unscripted
Ask for access and try to break it. Ask something obscure. Interrupt it. Ask for a person. How it fails tells you more than how it succeeds.
VoxHive is happy to be assessed on those terms. You can speak to a live agent from the homepage without signing up, and a twenty-minute walkthrough covers the data questions properly.
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