Get practical answers before you start a trial or compare vendors. The goal is to make the buying decision clearer—not to hide limitations behind a polished demo.
Ask whether pricing is by connected minute, exact second, real call, unique customer, component usage or a hybrid. Then ask whether each call is rounded up, whether there is a minimum charge, and what happens to partial minutes.
Clarify ringing, silence, hold time, voicemail, failed calls, spam, test calls, phone numbers, telephony, voice, model usage, transcription, SMS, storage, implementation, support and compliance add-ons.
Ask whether the AI usage charge stops, whether telephony continues, whether transfer minutes have a separate rate, and whether the answer changes when you bring your own carrier or SIP setup.
Get the concurrency limit, any daily or monthly call caps, overage price, queue behavior and the caller experience when capacity is reached.
Name the actual workflows you care about—booking, rescheduling, lead qualification, maintenance intake, message capture, payment routing, dispatch or transfer—and ask what the system can finish without a human.
An integration logo is not an action list. Ask whether the agent can read, search, create, update, cancel, reschedule, route and write back the exact records your workflow requires.
Require an explicit fallback for unknown questions, unavailable appointments, API timeouts, duplicate records, failed webhooks and unavailable destinations. The safest system should fail visibly rather than invent success.
Ask about warm versus cold transfer, context passed to the human, no-answer behavior, after-hours fallback, callback paths and whether the caller has to repeat information.
Test interruptions, accents, background noise, angry callers, conflicting instructions, unavailable times, long silences, repeated questions, failed transfers and broken integrations—not only the vendor’s ideal demo script.
Separate recordings, transcripts, summaries, phone numbers, extracted fields, logs and backups. Ask about retention, deletion, recording controls, subprocessors, employee/support access and model-training policies.
Ask for the actual trust-center evidence, audit report, certification, DPA, BAA or other agreement your organization needs. A badge by itself does not explain your configuration, retention or access model.
Ask what your team can change without professional services, the support channel and response targets, incident escalation, number portability, data/configuration export, notice periods, minimum terms and deletion timing.
Yes. You can start a virtual receptionist free trial for 7 days using one real business workflow, with a voice-demo option if you want to hear the AI first.
It depends on call volume, workflow scope and integrations. Read the breakdown of AI receptionist cost and pricing to compare the full receptionist cost before comparing vendors.
An AI receptionist can handle many simultaneous calls; the practical limit is your workflow, not the phone lines. Use the calls per hour calculator with your own volume and handle times to find where capacity runs out.
The Buyer Guide lets you select a provider, normalize its public pricing structure to your call volume, and see where you still need written clarification.
