How it works
Five things happen when the phone rings.
No menus, no press one for sales, no voicemail. Your number diverts to ORLA when you don’t pick up, when the line is engaged, or outside your hours. Here’s exactly what she does with the call, and what she won’t do.
The five steps
Every one of these happens on every call. You can hear the whole sequence for yourself on 01395 201218.
- 01 ANSWER
She picks up and says who she is
She answers in your business name, tells the caller she’s an AI receptionist, and tells them the call is recorded. That happens first, before anything else, on every single call.
We don’t offer a version that hides it. People are far more forgiving of a machine that says so than one they work out halfway through.
- 02 QUALIFY
She asks what you would ask
What the job is, where it is, how urgent, when they’re free, and a number to reach them on. The questions come from your setup, so a heating engineer and a dental practice get asked different things.
If someone wants work you don’t do, or an area you don’t cover, she says so rather than booking something you’d have to ring back and cancel.
- 03 SUMMARISE
The call becomes something you can read
Every call turns into a short written summary and a full transcript. Who rang, what they want, what she agreed, and anything she wasn’t certain about, flagged rather than buried.
Nothing needs listening back to. You read a paragraph instead of replaying four minutes of audio.
- 04 NOTIFY
It reaches you after the call
The summary comes to you once the caller has hung up, so you can see who rang while you were under a sink, mid treatment or on the motorway.
You decide what counts as urgent during setup, so the one that needs you today doesn’t sit behind four that don’t.
- 05 CALL BACK
You ring them, she doesn’t transfer
ORLA does not put callers through to a person. She can’t, and she won’t pretend she can. What she does is take the details and tell the caller that someone will ring them back.
If a caller asks for a human, she agrees, takes their details and says a person will call. No hold music, no transfer that goes nowhere.
What she won’t do
The boundaries matter more than the features. These are fixed, and they’re the same for every client.
She won’t pretend to be a person
She says she’s an AI receptionist at the start of the call. If a caller asks her directly whether she’s a real person, the answer is no.
She won’t guess
When a call goes outside the rules you set, she stops and takes it as a callback for a person instead of inventing a price, a date or an answer.
She isn’t an emergency service
If someone is in danger she tells them to ring 999. She is not a substitute for emergency services, and for clinics she doesn’t triage or give clinical advice.
She won’t hide the recording
Callers are told at the start. If a caller objects, that gets acted on and logged. The detail is in the caller notice.
Before she answers a single customer
Nothing goes live until you’ve heard it and approved it. We take what you tell us about your services, your areas, your hours and the things that should never be promised, and we build her around that.
Then you ring her yourself and try to catch her out. You approve the greeting and the exact words she uses about recording. Only when you’re happy do you set the divert on your own number, and you can take that divert off again yourself at any time through your phone provider.