Every AI receptionist demo runs the same script. Someone shares a screen, a pleasant robot books a haircut for a fictional Tuesday at three, everyone makes an impressed noise, and then the pricing slide shows up. I've sat through enough of these to believe the demo tells you close to nothing. Three questions tell you almost everything, and you can ask all three in about four minutes.

You're shopping because the phone gets missed. The 411 Locals study of 85 businesses put it at 62 percent of calls to small businesses going unanswered, and whatever your own number is, you know it isn't zero. Voice quality is the easiest thing to stage in a demo and the least useful thing to test. What you need to know is whether the thing hooks into the phone number, the calendar and the customer list you already have. In that order.

"What number does it answer on?"

Ask it exactly like that, then stop talking and let them fill the silence. Some vendors hand you a brand new number and expect you to repaint the van, edit the Google listing, and reach every fridge magnet you've handed out since 2011. Others forward from the line you already have, which is where the follow-ups start. Does caller ID still show the caller, or does every call now look like it came from the vendor? What happens to the voicemail box that's already full? How many rings before it picks up, and can you change that yourself at 6am on a Monday? And when you cancel, how long until your number is back under your control?

Rocketship answers on the owner's own number. Callers never learn a new one, never hear a forwarding click, never get the sense they've been routed somewhere. That's the answer you want, and if a vendor can't give it, you at least know what you're trading away.

The second half of the same question: what happens on a call it can't handle? If the reply is "it takes a message and emails you," you've bought voicemail with better grammar. The Numa Small Business Phone Report found 85 percent of callers who reach voicemail never call back, which makes a polite message-taker an expensive way to lose the calls you're already losing. What you want is a live transfer to a human while the caller is still on the line, plus a system that knows your hours, your services and your prices, so most calls never need transferring at all.

"Where does the booking actually end up?"

This is the question that separates a product from a science project. Make them book something during the demo, then make them open the calendar in front of you. Not a summary of the calendar. The calendar.

Then ask whether it checked availability before it promised that slot. A system that cheerfully books Tuesday at three without looking will eventually book two people into Tuesday at three, and I'd take a missed call over that every single time. Two customers. One driveway. A missed call is a maybe. Two vans in the same driveway is a story somebody tells at a barbecue.

Side note, then I'll get back to it. The most common thing I hear from owners who tried one of these and quit is that they ended up doing the same admin work anyway, just at 9pm, off a transcript, with the caller's number typed in by hand. That's the tax you're trying to avoid. Right. Back to it.

The caller's name, number and what they wanted should land somewhere you can pull up next Thursday, not only in an email you'll archive. In Rocketship it's one set of records, so the woman who called about a blocked gutter on Saturday is the same record Sophie can email or ring back on Monday. Different vendor, different plumbing, same test: after the call ends, where is the customer?

"What's my bill in the month everything goes wrong?"

Nobody quotes you the storm month. They quote you the average month, which is a month you will never have. So hand them a scenario. A heat wave in week one, a burst-pipe Thursday in week two, the other guy in town shutting up shop on the Friday, and your call volume doubled for twenty-one days straight. Ask what the invoice says. Then get these in writing, in the email thread, not on the call:

  • calls or minutes included, and the exact per minute rate past that
  • whether a transferred call gets billed twice, once by them and once by your carrier
  • whether outbound follow-ups come out of the same pool
  • what "unlimited" means in the terms of service, in the paragraph nobody reads

A vendor who won't put those four lines in an email is telling you the answer is embarrassing. For what it's worth, Rocketship has a free tier and paid plans start at 12 dollars a month, and I'd rather quote a boring number than run you through a discovery call about it.

Then hang up and call it yourself

This part is free and it takes ninety seconds. Ask for a live number you can dial from your own phone. Not a screen share, not a recording. A number. Call it from the truck with the radio on. Interrupt it halfway through a sentence, the way real people do. Ask whether you service a Trane XR14 or only install new units, then push for a price you already know and a Saturday slot in October.

If they won't give you a number, you have your answer, and it cost you nothing. And if the rep fields all three questions cold, without going away to check with engineering, somebody has asked before. Hesitation is data too.