12 questions to ask on an AI receptionist demo call
Every vendor in this category sounds identical in a feature list. These are the twelve things to say on the demo call that make them sound different, plus what a good answer looks like.
Disclosure: Bloombilt sells an AI front desk. We wrote this list to be used on us as well, and a couple of these are questions we would rather you did not ask. Ask them anyway.
Every product in this category has the same feature list: answers calls, books appointments, sends texts, integrates with your tools. The list tells you nothing. What separates them is behavior under pressure, and you find that out by talking to the demo like a customer rather than like a buyer.
Call the demo line yourself. Not a sales rep, the actual agent. If a vendor will not give you a number to call before you buy, that is your answer and you can stop there.
The twelve
1. “What’s your service call fee?” Substitute your own version: your minimum, your diagnostic charge, your trip fee. You are testing whether it improvises. A good agent either knows the real number or says it will have someone confirm. An agent that invents a plausible-sounding price will do that to a real customer, and you will find out when they refuse to pay it.
2. “Do you cover [a town at the edge of your area]?” Pick somewhere genuinely borderline. Service area is the most common thing these get wrong, and the failure is expensive in both directions: booking a job two hours away, or turning away someone down the road.
3. “Can someone come out tonight?” Tests urgency handling and after-hours logic. Listen for whether it distinguishes between “we can schedule you tomorrow” and recognizing this might be an emergency.
4. Describe an actual emergency, in the words a panicked person would use. Water through a ceiling. A burning smell. No heat with a baby in the house. The agent should escalate, not book. Then check what actually happened on your end: did a phone ring, did a text arrive, or did it quietly log a message?
5. “Do you work on [a brand or system you don’t handle]?” Tests whether it knows your limits. An agent that says yes to everything books you jobs you have to cancel, which is worse than not booking them.
6. Call it twice from two phones at the same moment. The concurrency test. Software should answer both. Human-staffed services will queue. Whether you care depends on whether your calls arrive in bursts, but you should know the answer before you sign, not during your busiest week.
7. “How much would it cost to [common job]?” You want a refusal. Any agent willing to quote a price is a liability. The correct behavior is offering to get someone out to look.
8. “What’s your billing unit, exactly?” Now to the sales side. Per minute, per call, per caller, or flat. Then: what starts the clock, does after-call work count, what is the overage rate, and what happens in a month with triple my normal volume. Get it in writing. This is where the surprises live and it is the single most common complaint in this entire category.
9. “Where does a booking actually land?” Answering the phone is not the job. Getting it onto your calendar and into whatever you use is the job. Ask specifically: does this create a calendar event, does it write into my software, or does it send me a message that I then have to re-enter. A lot of “booking” in this category is a message with a preferred time in it.
10. “What happens when it doesn’t know something?” Every agent hits a question it cannot answer. The behavior at that moment is the product. Good: takes a message, sets an expectation, escalates if urgent. Bad: guesses, loops, or hangs up.
11. “Can I hear a recording of a real call, and can I see the transcripts?” You want to know that you can audit what it says to your customers. If there is no transcript view, you are trusting a black box with your reputation. Also ask how you correct it when it gets something wrong, and how fast that takes effect.
12. “What does it take to leave?” Contract length, notice period, and critically: what happens to the phone number. If they ported your main line, getting it back is the thing that keeps people trapped. Ask who owns the number and how long a port-out takes.
Two more if you’re in a seasonal trade
Can I pause it? Lawn care, snow, pools, anything with an off season. Most services in this category have no seasonal pause, which means you either pay through a dead winter or cancel and re-onboard every spring. Ask directly.
What happens during a surge event? Storm, hail, first freeze, first hot day. Your average month is not the month that matters.
How to score it
Do not score on how impressive the conversation sounded. These all sound good now; that stopped being a differentiator a while ago.
Score on three things:
- Did it get your specifics right, or did it make things up? Questions 1, 2, 5, 7.
- Did the urgent call reach a human? Questions 3, 4.
- Did the outcome land somewhere you’d actually see it? Question 9.
Everything else is negotiable. Those three are the product.
Then do it to us
We build the front desk from your own website before you pay anything, specifically so you can run this list on it with your own facts rather than a generic demo. Call it, ask your service call fee, describe an emergency, and see what reaches your phone.
If it fails one of these, tell us and we would rather know. Fifteen minutes.