Put a receptionist to work
Outcomes
Hire for yourself first
The receptionist is the first hire in every AI workforce: it answers, captures, and books while nobody is watching the inbox or the phone. Every partner runs on the platform differently. What we have found is that the partners who sell AI Employees best run one for their own business first. The Chat Receptionist is already included in your plan, your own site is where you can experiment freely, and a receptionist working on your site becomes your best demo: "let me show you how it is doing for us" opens more client conversations than any pitch deck. Yours lives in Partner Center, under AI, because it serves your business; every client's lives in their Business App.
Open AI → Workforce in Partner Center and look at your own Chat Receptionist. If you have not configured it yet, Get set up covers naming it, giving it knowledge, and putting it on your website. Everything from here applies it to a client.
Chat, voice, or both
The decision is the client's channels, not the technology:
For the business whose leads arrive through the website: it greets visitors, answers from knowledge, and captures every conversation.
For the business that lives on the phone and misses calls after hours: a dedicated number, a chosen voice and greeting, and booking while the line would have rung out.
A business can run both, and the same knowledge, role, and capabilities serve both channels.
Two gates to check before you promise anything. Your own subscription decides what you can run: the Chat Receptionist is included from the Starter plan, and the Voice Receptionist and social channels unlock at Professional and above. A client gets whichever edition of Conversations AI is active on their account.
The ten-question audit
Before a receptionist meets anyone, interview it the way you would interview a new hire. The Chat button in AI → Workforce opens a conversation with it directly, private to you, before any widget is installed.
Open Chat in an incognito window so the conversation starts clean, and ask the ten questions a prospect is most likely to ask, prices included. Repeat the audit after every knowledge change.
Where the leads land
Every conversation lands in Conversations, and captured visitors become contacts, so the receptionist feeds the CRM rather than a silo. Check the Anonymous Visitors tab for chats where no contact details were captured, and set up notifications so a person sees new leads quickly; this guide covers lead capture notifications. For a client, all of this happens in their Business App, with Conversations AI active on their account.
Knowledge Check
Three quick questions on channel choice, plan gates, and the audit.