The principle: the team first, the agent as back-up
A reception team doesn't miss calls because it works badly, but because it does several things at once: the person at the desk, the patient at the counter, the file to finish, the colleague on a break. The AI voice agent is there to cover those moments. It's the rule at Sayelo: the agent backs up your teams and never replaces them.
In practice, this is usually done with conditional call forwarding. The phone rings at reception first. If someone answers, nothing changes. If nobody answers, or if the line is already busy, the call goes to the agent, which answers, takes action and sends a summary. The team stays in charge of every call it can take, and no longer loses the ones it can't.
Four moments when the agent takes over
Overflow
The receptionist is on the phone, a second call comes in, then a third. Without back-up, they get the engaged tone or voicemail. With forwarding when busy, the agent takes them in parallel: 1, 2, 5 or 10 simultaneous calls depending on the plan. Choose your plan based on the number of calls that really come in at the same time at your business; the pricing page gives the details.
Breaks and absences
Lunch, a meeting, welcoming a customer in person, a colleague on leave: the phone rings out. Forwarding on no answer covers these moments without reprogramming anything, since the agent only takes what nobody has picked up.
Peak times
Monday opening, back from the holidays, the end of the month: calls are concentrated into a few hours. The team looks after the people in front of them and the tricky cases, the agent takes the simple requests: appointments, opening hours, address. Our guide to peak hours helps you spot these time slots and absorb them.
Outside opening hours
In the evening, at weekends and on public holidays, the agent answers just as it does during the day. It books appointments in the calendar, takes messages, and transfers whatever can't wait to the number you've chosen, for example an on-call line limited to certain times. In the morning, the team finds summaries instead of a voicemail inbox to work through.
Who does what: a typical split
Where you draw the line is up to you, but one principle helps: the agent takes what is repetitive and what happens when nobody is there; the team takes what requires judgement, relationships or knowledge of a case.
| Type of call | The agent | The team |
|---|---|---|
| Appointment, rescheduling, cancellation | Books it in the calendar, confirms by SMS | Keeps an eye on the calendar |
| Practical question: opening hours, address, documents | Answers from your information | Adds to the information when a question keeps coming up |
| Emergency | Transfers according to your rules | Takes the transferred call |
| Complex request, advice, detailed quote | Qualifies it and takes a precise message | Calls back with the file to hand |
| Complaint, unhappy customer | Listens, takes notes, transfers or promises a callback according to your instructions | Calls back as a priority |
| Customer you look after personally | Applies the instruction on their record, for example “always transfer” | Takes the call |
| New question | Takes a message, and the question is passed up | Writes the answer once, approved before use |
In a medical centre, reception keeps the patient situations that need a human conversation; the agent books routine appointments, never gives medical advice and refers warning signs to the emergency services. In a notary's office, the clerks keep the substantive questions on cases; the agent identifies the caller and the case, then books the appointment or takes a message for the right member of staff. Our guide on medical secretary or AI details this split in a practice (in French).
Transfers to a human, set up properly
The transfer is the point of contact between the agent and the team. It needs setting up carefully.
- To whom. One transfer number is included from the Solo plan. From the Pro plan, multiple transfers route calls according to the reason for calling: reception, a practitioner, a partner, the on-call line.
- When. Each number can be offered only at certain times. Outside those times, the agent never offers it: the evening on-call line doesn't ring at midday, and the reception extension doesn't ring at night.
- For whom. Instructions per contact let you deal separately with an important customer or a sensitive case.
- Otherwise what. Decide what the agent does when it doesn't transfer: take a qualified message, with the reason for calling, the name and the number, which arrives in the summary.
Transfer numbers can be landlines or mobiles in the 9 countries where Sayelo is open.
Feedback to the team: nothing gets lost
Back-up is only worth something if the information comes back. After every call, a summary is emailed to the team: an overview, actions taken during the call, actions still to do, the transcript. Calls that need follow-up (a message taken, a callback promised) end up in “Activity” → “Calls”, with the “To do” filter, until someone deals with them, and the call history remains available.
Organise the reading like any other reception task: one person responsible for follow-ups per half-day, urgent callbacks dealt with before midday, the others during the day. Our guide to calling customers back sets out the method. If you work in Sellsy or monday.com, the call can also be logged on the customer's Sellsy record or in their monday.com item.
Introducing the agent to the team
The arrival of a voice agent sometimes worries a reception team. A few simple steps change how it is perceived.
- Say what it does, and what it doesn't do. It takes the calls the team couldn't have taken anyway. It doesn't touch the calls the team answers.
- Get the team involved in setting it up. The team is the one that knows callers' questions. When the agent can't answer, the question is passed up; someone writes the answer, and nothing is learned without human approval.
- Get the team to test it. Start the “Test call” together, at the top of the screen, to talk to the agent through the microphone, then call its number from a phone, to hear what callers experience.
- Read through the summaries together in the first week, and make corrections together.
With a phone system or IP PBX
If your calls go through a phone system, you keep it. It carries on distributing calls to extensions; you set it to send unanswered calls, overflow and out-of-hours calls to the agent. A phone system distributes calls, it doesn't answer them: when nobody is free, the call ends up in voicemail. Our comparison of an AI voice agent and a cloud phone system details the difference, and our guide to forwarding from a phone system or IP PBX explains the settings.
