Your first week with an AI receptionist
Most people set one up, glance at a summary or two, and then decide weeks later on a feeling. A week of deliberate checking gives you an actual answer — and almost everything worth fixing shows up in the first three days.
Day one: ring it yourself, badly
Not a clean test call. Mumble, interrupt it halfway through, ask something your website does not answer, change your mind about the time. You are looking for how it behaves when the call goes wrong, because that is the call you will not be there for. Then ring once as a normal customer would, and listen to the greeting as a stranger: does it say who you are, that this is a virtual assistant, and invite them to speak — in under about six seconds?
Day two: read every summary, not the bookings
The bookings are the easy part and they are already in your calendar. The value is in the calls that did not book. Why did they ring? What did the assistant not know? A pattern usually appears within ten summaries, and it is normally three or four questions rather than a systemic problem.
Day three: close the gaps you found
Write the answers to those three or four questions into a short document and upload it. Do not rewrite your website — a page written the way you would answer on the phone is better than a marketing page, and takes twenty minutes. This single step is the difference between an assistant that sounds competent by the end of the week and one that does not.
Days four to seven: leave it alone
Resist tuning. You need a clean run of ordinary calls to judge it, and changing the greeting every day means you are judging four different assistants. Let it work and collect the week.
The three numbers at the end
Compare against a normal week of missed calls from your phone records. This is the number the whole thing rests on.
Not enquiries — appointments in your calendar that you did nothing to create.
Where the assistant got it wrong or the caller needed you. A handful is normal. A majority means your call mix needs a person.
What a bad week actually tells you
If it booked nothing and every caller wanted something unusual, that is useful information, not a failed experiment: your calls need judgement and an assistant is the wrong tool. Better to learn that in week one than in month six.
Frequently asked
Ring it yourself and be a difficult caller — mumble, interrupt, ask something obscure. How it handles a call going wrong matters more than how it handles a clean one.
Three numbers: calls answered that previously were not, bookings made without you, and calls you had to rescue. The first two against your normal week of missed calls is the answer.
Fix the gaps on day three, then leave it alone. Changing settings daily means you are judging several different assistants rather than one.
Read why. Callers wanting things that genuinely need a person is a real finding — it means your call mix is not suited to this, which is worth knowing in week one.