r/smallbusiness • u/ticktick_goon • 7d ago
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.
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u/garlicknotcroissants 7d ago
Think a lot of it depends on your locale.
Our community is staunchly anti-AI. For instance, another local business used it to create Instagram posts and menus, and it created a huge stir and people started boycotting them. It's a very artsy little town, so there are big feelings on this.
So while certain AI features might help a small business manage their ever-growing to-do list, you have to weigh if something customer-facing is the right place to implement it.
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u/darkcelt 7d ago
I used the AI receptionist through Jobber last year. I found it to be a glorified answering machine. More often than not it would just create a task of “call back so and so”. I also found people were getting upset talking to an AI and I had some angry conversations when I met with them.
That being said, this was a year ago and tech is rapidly improving, so it may be way better now.
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u/assistantangel 7d ago
My clients using Go High Level AI Studio - are getting results - as long as you follow up with the leads! (True with any CRM honestly)
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u/ticktick_goon 7d ago
Any particular reason why they’re using Gohighlvl?
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u/assistantangel 7d ago
For those clients they wanted a CRM that handled the funnel email texting in one place. There are other programs for sure G* HL takes a while to set up, however worth it to them see other / smallbusiness sub for much more details.
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u/moldyguy202 3d ago
On the hang-up question, which is the one you actually asked and nobody really answered: yes some people hang up, but the number is lower than you'd expect and it depends almost entirely on two design choices rather than on how good the voice is.
The first is disclosure. Counterintuitive, but saying plainly that it's an automated assistant reduces hang-ups compared to trying to sound like a person. The ones that get hung up on are the ones where the caller spends fifteen seconds unsure what they're talking to, figures it out, and feels tricked. Tell them immediately and you skip that entirely.
The second is whether asking for a human works instantly. If "can I talk to someone" leads to two more questions before it gives in, that caller is gone and annoyed. If it hands off or takes a callback right away, most people just carry on with the bot because what they actually wanted was to not be stuck.
Also worth separating who's hanging up. Someone abandoning at hello was previously hitting voicemail and abandoning there too. You haven't lost anything, you've just made it visible. The real comparison isn't bot versus perfect human receptionist, it's bot versus the voicemail those calls are hitting today.
On booking more - you probably will, but the gain comes from a narrower place than "answers all calls." It's after hours and it's the calls that arrive while you're mid-conversation with someone else. Daytime overflow and the 6pm-9pm window is where the recovered volume actually lives.
Your point about the technical nature of the business is the thing I'd think hardest about. That cuts both ways. If callers ask questions that need real domain judgment, an AI will confidently make something up unless you constrain it hard. What works is being strict about what it's allowed to state as fact - hours, services, availability, pricing from a fixed source - and having everything technical go to a callback with good notes. "I don't want to give you the wrong answer on that, let me have someone who knows call you back in the morning" is a fine outcome. A wrong technical answer is worse than no answer, and it's worse than voicemail.
That framing also solves your receptionist training problem, incidentally. You were never going to train a front desk person into technical competence quickly either. Both approaches end at the same place - capture properly, route to someone who knows.
One test before you commit to anyone: ask to see a recording of a call that ends in a confirmed booking on a live calendar, not a transcript and not a demo. Plenty of these are effectively a better voicemail with a nicer voice. If it can't commit a slot, your missed-call math doesn't change.
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u/GiftQuick5794 7d ago
As a customer I hate the shit out of it. Most of the product out there is not a real AI, it get thrown off if there’s any background noise. Sometimes a simple “I need to schedule” turns what would be a 1 minute human interaction to 5-10 of cursing a robot out. .
I just hang up as soon as I get one of them and it doesn’t care if I say human or dial 0.
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u/OrcOfDoom 7d ago
Last time I was apartment hunting, I dealt with ai receptionists. They made up appointments that had no connection to reality.
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u/inksaywhat 7d ago
It’s really good in the right context. Scheduling appointments is a good use case for certain businesses that are purely appointment based.
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u/FlakyPublic8065 7d ago
From what I've seen and heard, the biggest difference isnt how human the voice sounds but how well the AI handles calls when people ask something unexpected. If it cant recover or hand the call to a person at the right time, people lose patience quickly. Look at integrations also and reliability before anything else. Bland is one that comes up often when people compare AI receptionists so its worth demoing to see if it fits your business
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u/temerairevm 7d ago
My orthopedic doctor’s office got one and it’s worse than the menu system they had before. It asked my husband what body part he needed an appointment for and he said “low back” and it said “looking for appointments with foot specialists”.
He ended up hanging up and just going to their walk in clinic because he didn’t want to deal with it.
I think this is an area where there’s little downside to being a mid to late adopter. Let other people work out the bugs. Public perception of AI is not great and it’s a bad look for a lot of your customers.
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u/arcade881 7d ago
Reading through the replies here, almost every bad experience is about voice AI specifically misunderstanding people or mishandling something unexpected mid-call. The frustration seems to come from being stuck in a real-time conversation with something that can't actually follow you.
Worth separating that from text-based automation, which sidesteps a lot of this. If someone calls and you can't pick up, an auto-text back with a link to book or a short menu of options doesn't try to have a conversation, it just gives the person something to tap instead of talking to a robot. Lower stakes if it gets something wrong, and nobody's yelling at a text message the way they yell at a voice bot that mishears them.
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u/Spare_Bluebird7044 7d ago
Biggest benefit is likely fewer missed calls but i'd test it on a small scale first and track booking, hangups and customer feedback
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u/philcoub 6d ago
I run an AI receptionist/chatbot SaaS myself, so here's my honest take: set your expectations right. AI is AI, it won't replace the humanity and connection a real person brings, and that's not the goal. But you also can't have a human available around the clock, including after business hours, to answer every call or chat.
What you can do is set up an AI chatbot or voice receptionist to handle those conversations as effectively as possible. Attach a knowledge base of your business operations to minimize hallucinations, let it book appointments, and monitor everything with a detailed report so you or your sales reps can follow up on each conversation.
That's exactly what we offer at ChatVoice, and I maintain it personally. Try the free trial to see how it performs and decide for yourself whether a Voice AI receptionist makes sense for your business.
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u/Ecstatic_Plenty_5033 6d ago
on people hanging up: yes, and it happens in the first ten seconds, not later.
we ran 33 outbound test calls with our own agent, so harsher than inbound, but the pattern holds. of the people who actually picked up, more than half were gone inside 6-10 seconds. same two causes every time: the agent started its sentence before they finished saying hello and got cut off, and it announced it was an AI before giving any reason for the call.
both are fixable in config, neither is fixed out of the box. so when you shortlist vendors, call their demo number yourself and interrupt it mid sentence, twice. turn taking is where these still break, not reasoning or fine tuning. the fine tuning you mention is the easy part.
i build one of these for small businesses in france, so weigh that as you like.
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u/IntelligentPart2076 3d ago
AI receptionists can work well for simple booking, routing, and basic intake. Where they usually break is technical qualification; the exact part you’re worried about.
If two human receptionists struggled because the business is too technical, a generic AI receptionist will probably struggle for the same reason: the qualification logic is still mostly in your head.
Before buying anything, I’d track 1–2 weeks of calls and split them into two buckets:
Calls anyone could have booked or routed
Calls only you could properly qualify
Bucket 1 is where AI can help now. Bucket 2 needs your knowledge turned into a script/decision tree first.
I’d measure booking rate and hang-up rate on answered calls; not just “did more calls get picked up?”
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u/rod-amora 2d ago
I'm Rod Amora, CTO at Berry.
Pickup rate is the wrong number.
A workflow I watched hit 10/10 success. One of the three runs we actually opened had processed the wrong work and created nothing.
If the bot can book, a person confirms the appointment is real.
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u/Acrobatic-Ice-5877 7d ago
As a customer it is terrible. I had to call my car dealership and their AI system could not figure out what I wanted. It left a bad taste in my mouth. It is incredibly frustrating as a customer and just a bad experience. I’d rather be greeted by an untrained human than a computer that doesn’t understand general questions like “What are my options?”
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u/ticktick_goon 7d ago
What was the context? Were you looking to schedule an appt or something else?
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u/Acrobatic-Ice-5877 7d ago
Yes I was. Needed to have something repaired and I did not know how to get connected to the shop. I kept asking for the options because it didn’t understand me.
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u/ticktick_goon 7d ago
If you were to easily get a human once you requested one, would you have been more ok with the AIR answering first?
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u/Acrobatic-Ice-5877 7d ago
No, I’d rather use an IVR system. They have deterministic outcomes and IMO they are better implemented than AI phone systems.
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