16 questions to ask an AI receptionist provider before you sign

AI receptionists are now capable enough that owners are tempted to switch one on and forget it. The difference between a system that books jobs and one that annoys customers is in the details below. Ask every provider these questions, and test the answers on a live call before you sign anything. For background on what these systems do well and where they fall short, read our guide to AI receptionists for contractors.

1. Can I call a live demo set up for a business like mine?

A recorded sales demo is a best case. You want to hear how the system handles your customers' questions, with their accents, their background noise and their half-finished sentences.

Do this: ask for a trial line loaded with your services, towns and hours. Call it from a car with the window down. Ask the questions your office hears most, then ask something odd ("Do you clean solar panels on a barn roof?"). Listen to how it handles what it doesn't know.

2. What happens when a caller describes an emergency?

A gas smell, a flooding basement, a tree on a power line. An AI receptionist that cheerfully books an appointment for Thursday is a liability.

Do this: ask to see the emergency rules. A good setup recognizes your list of emergency phrases, tells the caller to contact the utility or 911 when that's appropriate, and transfers to your on-call number or sends an urgent alert to a person. Test it by calling with an emergency in your own words.

3. How does a caller reach a real person?

Some callers will ask for a human right away. Forcing them through a script makes them hang up. Others need a person partway through: an angry customer, a commercial account, a question about an invoice.

Do this: ask whether the system can do a warm transfer (it tells your staff who's calling and why before connecting) and what happens if nobody picks up. The fallback should be a promised callback time and an alert to your team, not a dead end.

4. Where does it get its answers, and who updates them?

The AI only knows what it's given: your services, prices or price ranges, service area, hours and policies. When you raise prices or stop serving a town, someone has to change it.

Do this: ask to see the knowledge it's using, in plain language, and find out whether you can edit it yourself and how fast changes take effect. Ideally it reads from the same facts that run your website, so the two never disagree.

5. What does it say when it doesn't know?

The worst failure is a confident wrong answer: a made-up price, a promised date that's already booked, a service you don't offer. A careful setup admits it doesn't know and takes a message.

Do this: on your test call, ask for a firm price on a job you only quote on site. The right answer is something like "We give exact prices after seeing the job; I can book a free estimate." Ask the provider how they limit it to approved answers.

6. Does it book into my real schedule, or just take messages?

Taking messages is useful. Booking is better, but only if it sees your real availability and respects your rules: travel time between towns, job length by service, crews that only do certain work.

Do this: ask which CRM or calendar it writes to, whether it can see existing jobs, and how it avoids double booking. Then book a test job on a busy day and check where it landed. If it writes into your CRM, check that the caller's details and the call summary land on the right customer record.

7. Are calls recorded or transcribed, and how is notice given?

Many AI receptionists transcribe calls, and some record them. Federal law, at 18 U.S.C. § 2511(2)(d), allows recording when one party to the call consents, but some states require everyone on the call to agree. California's Penal Code § 632, for example, requires the agreement of all parties before a confidential communication is recorded. Our guide on whether you can record business calls covers the state differences. None of this is legal advice.

Do this: ask whether the greeting includes a recording notice, whether you can change its wording, and whether it applies to every call. Announcing the recording up front, on every call, is the simplest approach for a business that takes calls from many states.

8. Does it tell callers they're talking to an AI?

Some callers don't mind talking to an AI. A caller who finds out later may feel misled. Disclosure also sets expectations, so callers speak clearly and ask for a human if they want one.

Do this: ask whether the greeting can say plainly that an automated assistant is answering for your company, and whether it answers honestly if a caller asks "Am I talking to a real person?" California, for example, has a bot disclosure law that makes it unlawful to use a bot online to mislead people about its artificial identity in order to drive a sale, and a clear disclosure avoids liability under it. Ask a lawyer how your state's rules apply to phone calls.

9. Will it ever call customers on its own?

Answering calls and placing them are different things legally. In its February 2024 declaratory ruling, the FCC confirmed that AI-generated voices count as an "artificial or prerecorded voice" under the TCPA, so those calls require consent from the person being called, apart from emergencies and a few exemptions. Marketing calls of that kind need prior express written consent. The same ruling notes that FCC rules require these messages to identify the business responsible for the call, and marketing messages must offer a way to opt out.

Do this: if the provider offers outbound features (quote follow-up calls, reminder calls, reactivation campaigns), ask how they collect and record consent, and keep those features off until you've reviewed them with a lawyer.

10. Does it text callers afterward, and from which number?

A text summary after a call ("You're booked Tuesday 10 to 12 for gutter cleaning") is useful. It also has to come from a number that's registered for business texting. Twilio's A2P 10DLC documentation says anyone sending application messages to US users over a standard 10-digit number must register.

Do this: ask who registers the brand and campaign, whose name it's under, and how opt-outs (STOP replies) are handled. Read our 10DLC guide for the registration steps.

11. Who owns the phone number customers call?

If the provider assigns you a number and it's printed on your trucks and website, leaving them later means losing it unless you can move it. Federal law, at 47 U.S.C. § 251(b)(2), places a duty on local exchange carriers to provide number portability where technically feasible, but the account details and contract still matter.

Do this: keep your main number with a carrier in your company's name and forward calls to the AI, or get written confirmation that you can port the number out on request. See our guides to business phone numbers and porting a business number.

12. How am I billed, and do spam calls count?

Pricing may be per minute, per call, per booked appointment or a flat monthly fee with limits. Robocalls, wrong numbers and vendors selling you things can eat a per-call budget quickly.

Do this: ask for last month's call log from a similar customer (with details removed) to see how much is junk. Find out whether calls under a few seconds and screened spam are billed, and what happens when you go over a plan limit.

13. Can it screen sales calls and spam without blocking customers?

A receptionist that politely takes a message from every SEO salesperson wastes your time. One that blocks too aggressively hangs up on a new customer who sounds unsure.

Do this: ask how calls are classified and whether you can see every call it screened out, with a transcript, so you can spot mistakes. Review that list weekly for the first month.

14. Who owns the recordings, transcripts and caller data?

Call recordings and transcripts are a record of what your business promised. They may also contain addresses, gate codes and payment questions.

Do this: ask where recordings are stored, how long they're kept, whether the provider uses them to train its models, how you can export them, and how you delete them. Get the answers in the contract or the provider's written terms.

15. What happens to my calls if the service goes down?

Any hosted phone system can have an outage. The question is whether your calls ring into silence or roll over to something that works.

Do this: ask what the fallback is (forward to a cell phone, voicemail, a backup answering service) and whether it switches automatically. Ask how you'll be notified, and test it once by having them simulate a failure during a slow hour.

16. What are the setup fee, contract length and exit terms?

Some providers charge setup fees and lock you into a year. That's not wrong, but you should know it before you've printed the number on anything.

Do this: ask for a month-to-month option or a short trial, and get in writing what you take with you if you leave: the number (if it's theirs), recordings, transcripts and call logs. Our comparison of AI receptionists and answering services covers when each fits.

Where to start

If you only get through three questions on the first call, make them these:

1. Emergencies (question 2). One mishandled emergency costs more than any amount of convenience.
2. Number ownership (question 11). Keep the number in your name and you can always switch.
3. Recording consent (question 7). Get the notice right before the first call is answered.

Then test the system on a live line with your own staff calling in as customers. If you'd like help setting one up around your services and schedule, see our AI receptionist service, and ask us these same sixteen questions.

Frequently asked questions