Questions to ask any AI answering service before you sign
A demo is a performance. These are the questions that tell you what the ordinary Tuesday looks like.
The short answer
Ask what happens when the caller says something unexpected, who owns the phone number, what a conversation counts as on the bill, what it will refuse to do, how it hands off to a person, and what leaving looks like. A vendor who answers all six plainly is worth talking to. A vendor who redirects any of them to a demo is answering a different question.
The six that matter most
What happens when a caller says something off-script? Every system handles the expected call. Ask to hear a recording of one that went sideways.
Who owns the phone number? If the answer is anything other than you, the switching cost is not the monthly fee, it is your number.
What counts as one conversation on the bill? A wrong number, a hang-up at three seconds and a fifteen-minute booking may all bill the same. Ask which.
What will it refuse to do? A vendor who says it will handle anything is telling you they have not thought about the calls where a wrong answer costs real money.
How does it hand off to a person? And how long does the caller wait while it decides.
What does leaving look like? Ask before you join, in writing, while they still want your business.
Five more that are quieter but still bite
The first one is the sharpest. A booking emailed to you is a message, and a message is work you still have to do.
Our own answers, so you can hold us to them
You keep your number. Pricing is flat monthly and starts at $395, with no setup fee and no minimum term, and how the figure gets set is on the pricing page rather than buried in a proposal. There is no per-minute and no per-call charge. It refuses to guess, and what each system will and will not do is written on its own page under what we automate.
The limits are published for the same reason: a page that will not tell you where the system stops is not a page you can plan against.
How to run the demo itself
Do not read the script. Call it the way your worst caller does: interrupt it, change your mind halfway, mumble an address, ask something it has no way of knowing. What you are testing is not whether it is impressive. It is whether it says something confident and wrong under pressure, which is the failure mode that actually costs you a customer.
Ours is on the demos page and it calls your phone, so you can be as difficult as you like without anybody watching.
Frequently asked questions
Is there a question that reliably catches a weak vendor?
The billing one. A vendor who cannot say plainly what a billable event is has usually built the pricing to be hard to compare on purpose.
Should I ask for references?
Ask, but weigh them lightly. A reference is a customer who stayed. The useful version is asking how many businesses in your trade left in the last year and why.
What if I only want it after hours?
Say so in the first conversation. It changes the shape of the system and it should change the price. If it does not change either, ask why.
Ask us all eleven
The free audit is fifteen minutes and there is no pitch attached to it. Bring the list. The written findings are yours whether or not you ever buy anything.
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