# What should an AI receptionist say, and what should it never say? By Dee, Summit AI Solutions. Updated 2026-10-19. Canonical: https://summitaiautomations.com/blog/what-an-ai-receptionist-should-say-and-never-say/ ## What should the greeting say? Your company name, a short statement of who is speaking, and one question. Keep it under ten seconds. A caller wants to know they reached the right business and that something useful is about to happen. A good greeting names the company, says this is the automated assistant, and asks how it can help. For example: thanks for calling your company name, this is the automated assistant, how can I help you today. That tells the caller exactly what they are dealing with, and it invites them to talk in their own words instead of pressing buttons. Avoid long menus and avoid reading your whole service list. People calling a contractor are usually in the middle of a problem. They want to describe it and be taken seriously. Let the assistant ask follow-up questions one at a time, and keep each question short enough that someone on a speakerphone in a garage can answer it. Tone matters as much as words. Listen for a voice and pace that sounds calm and natural, not theatrical. Test it by playing the greeting for a few people who do not work for you and asking what they think the company is like. If the answer is cold or confusing, rewrite it. ## What should it be allowed to do? Answer questions you have approved, collect contact and job details, offer to request an appointment or a callback, and route urgent calls to a person. Its scope should be small and written down, because anything not on the list becomes a guess. Think of the assistant as the front desk, not the estimator. It can say what services you offer, what towns you serve, your business hours and how an estimate visit works. It can collect the information your office needs to follow up. It can send an acknowledgement text if you have the right consent in place. Put your approved facts into a short reference sheet: services, service area, hours, whether you charge for estimates, how callbacks work. Give it nothing else to improvise from. If a fact is not on the sheet, the right behavior is to say the office will confirm, not to fill the gap. Review the sheet whenever something changes. If you stop offering a service or expand to a new county, update the sheet the same day. Outdated facts spoken confidently by a machine are worse than silence. - State what services you offer and which towns you cover - Share business hours and how after-hours calls are handled - Collect name, number, address and a description of the problem - Offer a callback or a request for an estimate visit - Flag urgent calls to a person right away ## What should it never say? It should never quote a price, diagnose a problem it has not seen, promise an arrival time you have not approved, give legal or insurance advice, or claim to be a person. Each of these creates an expectation your business then has to meet or explain. Prices are the biggest trap. A home-service price depends on access, materials, the condition of what is already there and sometimes permits. A number spoken on the phone becomes a number the customer remembers. Teach the assistant to say that a technician or estimator will provide a written quote after seeing the job, and to move on to the next question. Diagnosis is next. Callers will describe symptoms and ask what is wrong. The assistant can repeat what it heard and say that a technician will look into it, but it should not guess. The same goes for anything involving code compliance, permits, warranties or insurance coverage. Promises are the third. It should offer to request an appointment and tell the caller the office will confirm. Never allow it to say someone will be there in an hour because that sounds good. - No prices, ranges or ballparks - No diagnosis or repair advice - No arrival times unless the office has confirmed them - No statements about insurance, legal or warranty outcomes - No claiming to be a human being - No talking about other customers or jobs ## How should it disclose that it is automated? Honestly and early. Most owners put a short disclosure in the greeting, and every owner should make sure the assistant answers truthfully if asked. A caller who learns later that they were talking to software without being told is more likely to be upset than one who knew from the start. Short wording works well: this is the automated assistant for the company, I can take your details and make sure the right person calls you back. Say it once, then get to the point. You do not need to apologize for it. If a caller asks are you a real person, the answer is no, followed by what happens next. Do not let the assistant dodge, change the subject or use a human name that suggests otherwise. Some owners give the assistant a first name for friendliness, which is fine, as long as it never claims to be human. Recording and consent rules are a separate matter. Florida has specific rules about recording calls and about texting consumers, and they change over time. Before you turn on recording or automated texts, confirm the disclosure and consent wording with a Florida attorney. Do not assume a template from another state applies. ## When and how should it escalate to a person? Whenever the caller asks for one, sounds upset, describes an emergency, or the assistant fails to understand them twice. Escalation should be fast, simple and never a dead end. Define the triggers in writing. A caller who says I want to speak to someone, a caller who mentions an active leak, no cooling, flooding, a fire or any danger, a caller who is angry about an existing job, and a caller who keeps repeating themselves should all be routed. Decide in advance what routing means during business hours and after hours. During business hours, that might mean passing the call to the owner or a designated number. After hours, it might mean texting the on-call person with a summary and telling the caller you will get back to them shortly, with an honest time. The caller should always hear what happens next. Where a live person is not available, the fallback is a priority callback list. Take the name, number and reason, mark it urgent, and make sure someone owns the list. A promise to call back that nobody keeps is the quickest way to lose a customer. ## How do you test the script before it goes live? Call it yourself, many times, as different kinds of callers. Then have someone outside the company call it and tell you what they felt. Fix the script, repeat, and review real calls weekly after launch. Make a short checklist of test calls: a normal job request, a price question, an emergency, an angry caller, a caller with a heavy accent or a poor connection, a caller who talks over the assistant, a caller who asks if it is a robot, and a wrong number. Run each and note what happened. Many problems show up in the first few calls. After launch, read a sample of real conversations every week for the first month. Look for places where the assistant sounded stiff, repeated itself or answered a question it should have deferred. Each is a one-line fix in the script. Keep a log of changes with dates, so you can tell which edit improved things and which made them worse. Treat the script as a living document, because your services, hours and rules will change.