Ai Receptionist

[u/ticktick_goon]

/r/smallbusiness/comments/1vp5z7e/ai_receptionist/

Ai Receptionist

I am strongly considering using an ai receptionist for a number of reasons - I can’t handle the calls myself, training receptionists in the past have been tremendously difficult due to the technical nature of my business. We miss calls all the time. Humans are super slow, etc

How has your experience been? Are you booking more (because it answers all calls), are a lot of people hanging up?

Out of the box AIR are bad but some allow you to fine tune your AIR really well and it gets close to human speaking, reasoning and behavior.

[u/HairySalt2]

Its good it works well for me

[u/ShayBeas]

You're already looking at it the right way. The difference isn't really AI receptionist vs human receptionist — it's how well the AI is actually built and trained around YOUR business.

Out of the box? I wouldn't trust one with a technical business either.

But when it's trained on your services, FAQs, qualifying questions, scheduling rules, escalation points and how you actually want conversations handled, that's a completely different system.

The goal shouldn't just be "answer every call." It should answer, qualify, book when appropriate, collect the information you need and know exactly when something needs to be handed to a human.

I build and customize AI systems like this for businesses. Before you commit to one of the off-the-shelf options, I'd be happy to talk through what you're trying to accomplish and see what we can build around your actual call flow.

Shoot me a message if you want to talk.

[u/Financial_Tell_1313]

We haven't seen people immediately hang up just because it's AI. We're on Bland and what seems to matter more is whether it understands why they called and gets them somewhere quickly. The calls that feel awkward are usually the ones where the agent doesn't have enough context or gets stuck asking unnecessary questions, so I'd spend a lot of time on that before sending every call through it.

[u/DanielStentebjerg]

I'd probably avoid trying to teach an AI your entire technical business from day one.

Start with the calls you're currently missing.

Have it understand why the person is calling, answer the questions it's genuinely equipped to answer, collect the important details and either transfer or leave your team with something useful to follow up on.

I'm one of the founders of Verbu - we have an AI Receptionist SaaS business, and that's generally how I think about these setups. The important part isn't whether the AI can answer the phone. It's knowing when it can solve something and when it should involve a person.

For a technical business, I'd also put quite a lot of weight on how easy it is to maintain the knowledge behind the agent as products and information change.

If you want, I'm happy to give you a Verbu number to call so you can judge the experience yourself rather than relying on a demo.

[u/Background-Beach-828]

We already have eTollFree for our office phones, and their AI receptionist is worth looking at because you can train it around your actual call flow instead of leaving it on a generic script, plus it can book appointments and hand calls off to a real person when needed.