What happens when an AI receptionist can't help?

It does 3 things: it says plainly that it can't help with that, takes a message with a good time to call back and flags it for you. A caller might want a price you haven't given it, or ask about a service you don't offer. Your receptionist doesn't guess.

It never makes up an answer, and it never pretends to be you.

You decide what counts as urgent for your business, and what should happen when a call meets that description. Your receptionist doesn't make that judgment itself. It listens to what the caller says and applies your rules.

For example, a plumber might mark calls about water coming through a ceiling as urgent. An HVAC company might do the same for no heat in winter, and a property manager for a tenant locked out of their home.

When a call matches your rules, your receptionist follows your escalation instructions. On Professional and Premium ($179 and $299 a month), those can include transferring the caller to someone on your team, set up the way you choose.

In an emergency, your receptionist stops asking its usual questions, tells the caller it's marking the call as urgent and that the team will call them right back, takes their name, number and address, and texts you right away.

It tells a caller to hang up and call 911 only if they say someone is in immediate danger. It doesn't decide on its own that something is dangerous, and it doesn't send every urgent problem to 911.

A receptionist isn't an emergency service and shouldn't act like one. Its job is to point the caller to the right help and get the message to you fast.

What happens depends on your plan, and callers are told at the start of every call that they're speaking to an automated receptionist. If a caller asks whether it's a person, it says it's the automated receptionist for your business and carries on helping.

If they want to speak to someone: on Basic ($99 a month), it takes the details and passes them to you. On Professional and Premium, it can transfer the caller or route them to the right person on your team.

Your receptionist won't give 4 kinds of advice: medical, legal, financial or tax. It also doesn't try to diagnose a fault. If a caller needs that, it takes the details and passes them to you, or follows your instructions for that type of call.

Every call is checked within three minutes of ending. A separate check looks at what happened. Did it escalate when it should have? Did it tell the caller it's automated? Was the caller left with a way forward? If something went wrong, the call is flagged for you.

You also get the recording, the transcript and a summary, so you can see exactly what was said. Read more about the check report.

4 decisions make these moments go smoothly:

1. 1What counts as urgent for your business.
2. 2What should happen with an urgent call, and who should be told.
3. 3Who gets the text when a call is marked as an emergency.
4. 4On Professional and Premium, who calls should be transferred to, and when.

For more on setting this up, see our guide to an AI receptionist for small business, and for how callers react to an automated answer, will customers hang up on an AI receptionist?