Thirty Questions to Ask Before You Sign Anything
Every AI receptionist demo sounds impressive, because demos are run on the happy path. These are the questions that reveal what happens off it. Work through them with any vendor you are considering, including us, and tick them off as you go.
Your ticks are saved in this browser, so you can run the same list past two or three vendors across a fortnight and compare properly.
Vendor Evaluation Checklist
Thirty questions. Tick them off as each vendor gives you a straight answer.
Your ticks are saved in this browser, so you can work through the list over several sessions.
01Call quality and handling
0/6How it performs on real callers, not scripted demos.
02Integration and booking
0/6Whether it really writes into your systems, or just notifies you.
03Data, privacy and recordings
0/6You stay accountable for this data even when a supplier holds it.
04Pricing and true monthly cost
0/6What the bill looks like when your marketing is working.
05Control, escalation and failure
0/4What the caller experiences when things go wrong.
06Contract, support and exit
0/2The terms that matter most on the day you want to leave.
This checklist is provided as general commercial guidance and is not legal advice. For questions about privacy obligations, call recording consent or contract terms specific to your circumstances, seek professional advice.
How to Use This List
You are not trying to catch anyone out. You are trying to surface the handful of constraints that will actually matter in month three, which almost never come up in a sales conversation unless you raise them.
Ask for a recording, not a description
Anyone can describe how their system handles an angry caller with a strong accent and a bad line. Ask to hear one. Vendors confident in their product will happily play unedited recordings, or let you ring the system yourself and try to break it.
The answers that should worry you
Vagueness on data location, refusal to quote a total monthly cost at your actual volume, no clear escalation path to a human, and any contract that makes leaving expensive. None of these are dealbreakers on their own, but all of them predict friction later.
Weight by your own risk
A single-operator trade business and a medical practice have genuinely different priorities. Data residency and privacy questions matter enormously for one and barely at all for the other. Score the sections that apply to you rather than treating all thirty equally.
The Six Areas That Actually Matter
Thirty questions grouped into the six areas where AI reception deployments most commonly disappoint. Coverage of all six is what separates a considered decision from a demo-driven one.
Call quality and handling
How the system performs on real Australian callers, poor connections, accents, interruptions and questions it was never configured to answer.
Integration and booking
Whether it genuinely writes into the systems you already run, or simply emails you a transcript and calls that an integration.
Data, privacy and recordings
Where recordings and transcripts are stored, who can access them, how long they are kept, and whether that satisfies your obligations.
Pricing and the true monthly cost
What the bill looks like at your real call volume, including overages, and what happens in an unexpectedly busy month.
Control, escalation and failure modes
What the caller experiences when the system cannot help, when it is uncertain, and when it is entirely unavailable.
Contract, support and exit
Lock-in, notice periods, who you call when it breaks at 4pm on a Friday, and what you can take with you if you leave.
The Traps Worth Knowing About
None of these are hypothetical. They are the issues that most commonly turn a promising deployment into a quiet cancellation six months later.
Integration that is really just a notification
A great many products describe themselves as integrating with your booking system when what they actually do is send you an email or a webhook containing the caller’s details, leaving a human to type it in. That is not useless, but it is a fundamentally different product from one that checks live availability and writes a confirmed booking.
- Ask explicitly: does it read live availability, or only write a request?
- Ask what happens when the slot is taken between the call and the write
- Ask to see a booking created end to end during the demo, in your own system
- Confirm which of your systems are genuinely supported rather than on a roadmap
Per-minute pricing that punishes success
Per-minute and per-call pricing looks cheap at demo volumes and becomes expensive exactly when your marketing is working. Worse, it creates a perverse incentive to keep calls short, which is the opposite of what you want when a caller is a high-value new enquiry.
- Model the cost at three times your current volume, not your current volume
- Ask what a single twelve-minute complex call costs under their model
- Check whether after-hours, weekend or public holiday minutes are priced differently
- Ask for the actual invoice of a comparable customer with the numbers redacted
Vague answers on where recordings live
Call recordings and transcripts frequently contain personal and sometimes health information. Under the Privacy Act 1988 and the Australian Privacy Principles you remain accountable for that data even when a supplier processes it. A vendor who cannot tell you what country it sits in is telling you something important.
- Ask which country recordings, transcripts and personal data are stored in
- Ask whether call content is used to train shared or third-party models
- Ask about retention periods and whether you can trigger deletion on request
- Ask who inside the vendor can listen to your calls, and whether that is logged
No graceful failure path
The single biggest driver of customer complaints is not the AI misunderstanding something. It is the AI misunderstanding something and then trapping the caller in a loop with no way to reach a person. A confident escalation path matters more than raw accuracy.
- Ask what a caller says or does to reach a human, and how quickly that works
- Ask what happens when the system is uncertain rather than plainly wrong
- Ask what callers hear during an outage, and whether calls fall back to your line
- Ask for the actual uptime record rather than the target in the marketing copy
Next Steps
AI Receptionist ROI Calculator
Once you have real quotes, model whether the numbers justify the change.
Run the numbers →AI Receptionist Setup Checklist
Chosen a vendor? This is the fourteen-day path from signature to live.
Plan the rollout →How to Choose an AI Receptionist
The longer-form guide to selection criteria and how to run a fair trial.
Read the guide →Frequently Asked Questions
How many vendors should I actually compare?
Three is the practical sweet spot. One gives you no reference point for what is normal, and beyond three or four the comparison becomes hard to hold in your head and the process stalls. Run the same thirty questions past each of them and insist on hearing real call recordings from every one. The differences that matter tend to emerge in the answers to questions five, eleven and twenty-six rather than in the feature lists, which look almost identical across the market.
Should I insist on a trial before committing?
Yes, and structure it deliberately rather than accepting whatever is offered. A useful trial routes a genuine slice of real traffic (after-hours calls, or overflow when your line is busy) for at least two weeks, so the system meets real callers with real accents on real connections. A trial where you and a colleague ring in and ask sensible questions proves almost nothing. Agree in advance what success looks like, in numbers, so the decision at the end is not purely a matter of impression.
What is a reasonable monthly cost for an Australian small business?
The market spans a very wide range depending on call volume, integration depth and whether you need after-hours only or full coverage. Rather than anchoring on a headline figure, get every vendor to quote a total monthly cost at your actual call volume including any overage, then compare those numbers. Be particularly careful with plans priced per minute, since the quoted entry price rarely resembles the bill once genuine volume arrives. Our own pricing is published, which is a reasonable thing to expect from any vendor.
Do I need to tell callers they are speaking to an AI?
There is no blanket Australian law requiring disclosure on every call, but the position is more nuanced than a simple yes or no, and it is moving. Australian Consumer Law prohibits misleading or deceptive conduct, so actively claiming the AI is a named human employee is a genuine risk. Separately, if you record calls, state and territory surveillance devices laws generally require you to notify callers that the call is being recorded. Most businesses handle both with a single short line at the start of the call, which in practice callers accept without difficulty. If your industry has its own conduct rules, check those as well.
What happens to my call data if I leave a vendor?
Ask before you sign, because it is much harder to negotiate afterwards. You want a clear answer on three points: whether you can export your call records, transcripts and any captured contact details in a usable format; how long the vendor retains your data after termination; and whether deletion is available on request. A vendor that cannot commit to an export path is effectively holding your enquiry history hostage, which becomes a real problem if your call log is also your customer list.
Is a longer contract worth it for a lower monthly rate?
Rarely, in a market moving this quickly. The capability difference between what is available now and what will be available in twelve months is substantial, and a two or three year lock-in at today’s capability is a poor trade for a modest discount. Month-to-month or a twelve-month maximum keeps your options open. If a vendor will only offer a meaningful discount on a multi-year term, that is worth noticing in itself. It usually indicates concern about retention rather than confidence in the product.
Sources and further reading
- Australian Privacy Principles (Office of the Australian Information Commissioner)
- The Privacy Act 1988 (Office of the Australian Information Commissioner)
- Consumer guarantees under the Australian Consumer Law (Australian Competition and Consumer Commission)
Ask Us the Hard Ones
We would rather answer all thirty questions properly than win a customer who discovers the answers in month three. Send the list through and we will work down it.