Your First Call

Before a customer rings your receptionist, you should. It takes two minutes, and it’s the only way to know what your business actually sounds like now.

Hear it before a customer does#

Reading your settings is not the same as hearing them spoken. On the phone you notice immediately if a service has the wrong name, a price is one you’d never quote, or the first free slot is further out than you’d ever tell someone.

Better you find those than a customer does.

How to do it#

1. 1

   Call from a different phone

   Use your mobile if the business line is a landline. Calling a forwarded number from itself behaves strangely on some carriers.

2. 2

   Act like a customer, not a tester

   Describe a real job the way someone would at 8pm with a problem — vague, half a sentence, background noise. Don’t read a script.

3. 3

   Let it ask its questions

   Answer naturally. Notice whether the order feels right for your trade, and whether it asks anything you wouldn’t bother asking.

4. 4

   Book a slot

   Go all the way through. It’s the only way to confirm your calendar connection genuinely works.

5. 5

   Cancel the test appointment

   Delete it from your calendar straight away, or it sits in pipeline and later counts against your hold rate.

What you should hear#

• It identifies itself as an AI and says the call may be recorded. That happens on every call and can’t be switched off.
• Your business name, said the way you say it.
• Questions that make sense for your trade, not generic ones.
• A price you’d stand behind, or an honest “a technician needs to look first”.
• A specific appointment time, not “someone will get back to you”.

Check the whole path#

Hanging up is only halfway. Confirm the rest actually happened:

• The appointment is on your calendar, at the right time
• The alert reached your phone
• The call appears in Conversations with a recording
• The transcript reads the way you remember it

If any of those is missing, that’s the thing to fix, not the conversation itself.

Then fix what you heard#

Anything you want changed lives in Business Config. Change one detail, then ring again and ask the exact question you changed. Ten seconds of checking beats hearing it wrong next week.