The limits
What ORLA will not do.
This page matters more than the list of what she does. A receptionist you cannot predict is worse than a voicemail, so here is every line she will not cross and the reason for it. If any of this changes, this page changes first.
She will not pretend to be human
She says she is an AI receptionist at the start of every call, before anything else, and again any time somebody asks. There is no setting that turns this off.
She will not put you through to a person
Live transfer is switched off. A blind transfer once dropped a caller into a personal voicemail, so until a pipeline proves it can hand a failed transfer back to her, she offers a callback instead and says so honestly.
She will not quote a price she was not given
She reads from your price book. If a caller asks about something that is not in it, she says she will have someone confirm rather than guessing a number you would then have to honour.
She will not promise a time nobody agreed
She offers slots your diary has actually confirmed. She will not tell a customer somebody will be there within the hour because it sounded reassuring.
She will not handle a real emergency
If a caller describes gas, fire, flood or a medical situation she stops, tells them to ring the emergency service, and does not try to book anything. She is not an emergency service and will never behave like one.
She will not take card or bank details
No payment details are ever spoken to her or stored by her. If a caller offers, she declines and explains how payment actually works.
She will not book work you have told her you do not take
Out of area, out of hours, or simply not your trade — she says so and takes a message instead of filling your diary with jobs you have to ring back and cancel.
She will not invent availability
If the diary has nothing, she says so. A booking that does not exist is worse than no booking.
She will not say a recording stopped unless it stopped
On lines where she cannot switch recording off, she says she cannot, apologises, and offers a callback. She will not claim a control she does not have.
She will not make sales calls for you
Outbound cold calling is switched off by design, not by configuration. She answers; she does not chase.
She will not go live on your line until you have heard her
Going live needs a passed test call and a person at our end approving it by hand. Signing up cannot do it. Paying cannot do it. There is deliberately no second route to switching her on.
She is not perfect, and we will not claim she is
She mishears, like every phone line does. Every call sends you a summary before anything is acted on, and anything she is unsure of is flagged for a callback rather than guessed at.
Do not take our word for any of it. Ring 01395 201218 and try to make her break one of these. That is a working line answered by the same system a client’s customers reach.