AI receptionists are a young market, which means the demos are polished, the claims are big, and the contracts vary wildly underneath. Some products do what they say. Some market capabilities their entry tier does not include. Some hide the numbers that decide what you will actually pay. The fix is not cynicism — it is a checklist. Here are the questions we think every trades owner should put to any AI receptionist vendor before handing over a card. We sell one of these products, so read this knowing that; we have marked where our own answers live, and we have kept the questions ones you should ask everyone — including us.
Pricing questions
- What is the overage rate, in writing, on the pricing page? If a vendor sells by included minutes but will not publish what an extra minute costs, the real price of a busy month is unknowable. Do not accept “it depends.”
- What happens when I exceed my plan? Some services automatically move you to a pricier tier — sometimes locked in for future billing periods. Ask whether any plan change ever happens without your explicit say-so.
- How are minutes counted? Ask whether calls are rounded up, and by how much. Rounding every call to the next minute quietly inflates short calls.
- What does the entry tier actually do? The most common trick in this market is the cheap headline plan that cannot book — it takes a message or texts a link, and the capability you saw in the demo starts two tiers up.
- Can I cancel anytime, and what is the refund policy? Read the terms; “non-refundable” buried in a terms page is worth knowing before, not after.
The headline price is not the price. The overage rate, the rounding, and what the entry tier is missing are the price.
Capability questions
- Does it book the appointment during the call — on the plan I am buying? Not “sends a scheduling link,” not “on the higher tier.” Booked, on a calendar, before the caller hangs up.
- How does it tell an urgent call from a routine one? Ask for the mechanism, not the adjective. Is there a triage vocabulary for your trade? Can you edit it? Plenty of products advertise urgency detection that turns out to be a generic message form.
- Can it answer questions about my services? A receptionist that knows nothing about your business frustrates exactly the caller you most want to keep — and ask what it says when a caller asks what a job costs, and who confirms the price.
- What happens with two calls at once? A storm or a cold snap sends calls in bursts. Ask directly whether simultaneous callers get answered or get a busy signal.
- Does it handle Spanish-speaking callers? In most service areas this is real revenue, not a nice-to-have.
Transparency questions
- Does the AI pretend to be human? This one is about your reputation. Callers who feel tricked get angry at your business, not the vendor. An assistant that is simply good — and does not lie about what it is — keeps the trust you have built.
- Can I hear every call? Recordings and transcripts of every call are how you audit what is being said in your company’s name. If they are gated to an expensive tier, ask why.
- What happens when it cannot handle a call? No AI handles everything. The honest answers involve capturing the details and alerting you fast — ask to see exactly what that failure path looks like.
- How do I fix a wrong answer? You will want to correct or update what the assistant says as your business changes. Ask how, and whether it costs anything.
Setup and day-two questions
The demo shows you day one. Most of the cost and friction lives in day two — the setup, the changes, the ownership of your own line. Ask these before you sign anything:
- Do I keep my phone number? The right answer is yes — you forward your existing line, and you can un-forward it the day you leave. Be wary of any setup where the vendor’s number becomes the number your customers know.
- What does setup actually involve, and who does it? You should be able to load your services, prices, hours, and service area yourself, in an afternoon, without a professional-services invoice.
- How fast do changes take effect? You raised a price, added a service, changed your hours — does the assistant know today, or after a support ticket?
- What happens during an outage? No service has perfect uptime. Ask what a caller hears if the system is down, and how you find out it happened.
Data questions everyone should ask
Your call recordings are business records and your callers’ information is sensitive, so ask every vendor — including us — where recordings are stored, how long they are kept, who at the vendor can access them, and whether your calls are used to train anything beyond your own account. Also ask what happens to your data if you cancel. A vendor with good answers will give them quickly and in plain language; a vendor that stalls on data questions is telling you something too. For our part, retention is published per plan and recordings and transcripts are included on every plan — and any vendor you talk to should be able to state their equivalents just as plainly.
How ClearLine answers the ones we can
Since we are asking you to interrogate vendors, here is where we stand on the load-bearing questions. Our overage rate is published on every plan — from $0.35/min on Basic down to $0.22/min on Pro, printed right on the pricing page, so you know your rate before a busy month, and it gets cheaper as you grow. No plan change ever happens without you making it, and your usage meter warns you before you hit your limit. Cara books appointments during the call on every plan, including the cheapest one. She uses an urgent-call vocabulary tuned to your trade that you can edit in settings, answers callers’ questions from what you load, understands a Spanish-speaking caller and delivers that lead to you in English, and takes simultaneous calls. She does not pretend to be human. Every call comes with a recording and a transcript, on every plan. And it is month-to-month — you can cancel anytime.
One honest caveat to end on: no vendor, us included, is the right fit for every shop, and the point of this list is not that we ace every question — it is that you should get real answers before you pay anyone. Print it, ask everything, and keep whoever answers plainly. If a demo dazzles but the answers wobble, believe the answers.
How to run the actual test
Once the answers check out on paper, test the product the way it will actually be used: forward your real line for a week — most vendors, us included, work through ordinary conditional call forwarding, so this is minutes to set up and minutes to undo. During that week, call your own number and try to stump it: ask what a specific job roughly costs, give a messy address, describe a problem that should register as urgent, ask a question it cannot know. Then read the transcripts of the real calls it took. A week of your own callers is worth more than any demo, any review, and frankly any blog post — including this one.