What happens if the AI does not know the answer?
It should say so, take the question down, and pass it to you — not invent something. This is the single most important thing to test before you trust an assistant with real callers, and the easiest to check: ask it something obscure about your own business and listen to what it does.
What good behaviour looks like
Plainly and without drama: it does not have that to hand.
The actual question, in the caller’s words, not a category. "Do you take my insurance" and "do you do payment plans" need different answers from you.
Says someone will come back to them, and takes a number to do it on.
Not knowing one thing should not end the call. It can still take the booking.
Why this matters more than the hit rate
An assistant that answers 95% of questions and invents the other 5% is worse than one that answers 80% and says so. A wrong answer about your prices, your hours or your policies reaches the caller as fact, and you only find out when they turn up expecting something you never offered. Guessing does not fail safely.
How to widen what it knows
Most gaps are not model problems, they are knowledge problems. Your website does not say whether you take walk-ins, so the assistant cannot either. Read a week of call summaries, notice which questions keep coming back unanswered, and add those answers — a short document beats rewriting your website.
The questions it should never answer
Some questions should go unanswered on purpose: anything that needs professional judgement, anything about someone else’s account, and anything where being wrong is expensive. The right response is to take a message, not to try harder.
Frequently asked
It should not, and you should verify that before trusting it. Ask it something obscure about your business during the trial and listen to what it does with the gap.
Call summaries. The questions that keep arriving without good answers are the gaps, and they are usually the same handful.
Yes. It learns from your website and from documents you upload, so a short FAQ document covers the things your site does not say.
It should appear in the summary for that call, along with the caller’s details, so the follow-up is possible.