How do I know my AI receptionist is working?

Start with the calls that used to go nowhere. Your carrier's log shows how many rang out or hit voicemail last month, and that's the baseline every other number is measured against.

Circulating figures in this category are worth ignoring. Savings claims of tens of thousands a year trace back to vendor blog posts with no source behind them.

Your own numbers take about an hour a month to gather. A spreadsheet with one row per week is plenty.

Calls answered. Count every call GreetKeeper picked up, and note how many came in after hours or while your line was busy.

Bookings made on the call. Each appointment written into your calendar is a job that no longer depends on a callback. GreetKeeper's booking.created events give you the count.

Transfers and messages. These show how often a caller needed a person, and which topics sent them there. The topics are your list of lines to add to the brief.

New jobs won. Tag the new-customer calls and follow each through to an invoice. Multiply jobs by the average job value to get the month's revenue from answered calls.

Then compare against the old baseline. If voicemail used to win you six of those jobs and the month brought nine, the difference is what the receptionist earned.

An estimate tells you whether to try. Measuring afterward tells you whether to stay. Say you run a three-van electrical firm, and in month one the assistant answered 140 calls on no-answer forwarding. You spend an hour tagging the transcripts.

New-customer inquiries come to 38. Existing customers account for 61, vendors and junk for 22, and 19 are miscellaneous. Of the 38 new inquiries, 17 booked an estimate during the call and 9 turned into jobs averaging $620, which is $5,580 of work.

It's tempting to set $5,580 against a $49 subscription and stop. The fair comparison is against what you'd have won anyway. Before, those 38 callers hit voicemail, maybe half left a message, and you won about a third of the ones you called back. That's roughly 6 jobs compared with 9. The assistant's real contribution is about 3 jobs, or $1,860, which is still a strong month.

A complete sheet has a cost side with more than the subscription on it. Add any overage. Include the automation tool's monthly fee if you're paying for one only because of this. Your own reading time counts too: twenty minutes a day in the first fortnight and perhaps an hour a week after that, priced at whatever your time is worth.

Give unbooked inquiries their own column. Read the transcripts where a new caller didn't book and note the question that stalled the call. Each one is a line to add to the brief, and next month's column should be shorter.

Be careful with staff time saved. It only counts if it turned into something, such as fewer overtime hours, invoices sent sooner or a front desk that stopped falling behind.

Judge a full month at minimum, and compare against the same month last year, since a busy season flatters any new tool that happens to start in it. Keep the sheet going for a quarter.

GreetKeeper's pricing is published, so you know the cost side before talking to anyone: $49 for 200 calls, $149 for 750, $349 for 2,000.

Overage rates are printed too, at $0.45, $0.35 and $0.25 a call, and robocalls and spam calls are screened out without counting toward your plan.

Every call fires a webhook event, such as call.completed or booking.created, so you can count results in a spreadsheet or your CRM automatically. The 14-day free trial gives you two weeks of real numbers first.