AI Receptionist Onboarding Guide

Company identity — Business name, locations, hours, public phone numbers, departments, service areas, and how the company describes itself.

Service catalog — What the business does, what it does not do, how customers describe those services, and which requests belong elsewhere.

Lead categories — New sales, existing customer, warranty, vendor, employee, emergency, commercial, residential, and other recurring call types.

Qualification rules — Minimum project size, geography, ownership, timing, property type, appointment requirements, and any conditions requiring human review.

Calendars — Appointment types, duration, staff assignment, travel, blackout periods, same-day rules, rescheduling, and confirmation.

Transfers — Primary destination, backup destination, hours, failed transfer path, and which situations deserve immediate human contact.

Approved knowledge — Pricing statements, financing language, warranty information, promotions, common questions, and areas where the system should never answer without a person.

Notifications — Who receives qualified leads, urgent issues, booking notices, failed transfers, and unresolved questions.

Testing — Create at least twenty real scenarios from recent call history. Include ordinary and messy conversations.

Good onboarding takes the business out of people’s heads and turns it into documented rules. That documentation becomes useful even beyond the AI system because it exposes where employees were already relying on tribal knowledge.