What is a knowledge base?

For an AI receptionist this is the difference between useful and useless. It answers from what it was told and nothing else.

Size is not the measure. Twenty accurate answers to the questions people actually ask beat two hundred pages of general material.

The fastest way to build one is to listen. Two weeks of real call transcripts tells you what people ring about, which is rarely what you expected.

Decay is the standing risk. Prices change, staff leave, a service gets dropped, and the base keeps confidently saying the old thing.

Say you run a two-vet clinic. A useful entry doesn't read "We offer vaccinations." It reads like this: "Puppy vaccines start at 8 weeks. The first visit is 30 minutes and costs $85 with the exam. Bring any records from the breeder or shelter. We don't vaccinate a dog that's sick right now, so book a regular exam instead." That's about 40 words, and it covers the question, the follow-up and the awkward edge.

Write your entries in the order the phone really rings. Your hours and address come first, followed by whether you take new patients and what an exam costs at your clinic. Add whether you see exotic pets, along with the name of the clinic that does if you don't. Cover what to do in an emergency after 6 pm, with the 24-hour hospital's address written to be read slowly. By entry twelve you'll be writing down things that only ever lived in your receptionist's head.

A missing answer costs you a handover. Wrong ones cost more, because your callers act on them. If your base still says Saturday hours end at 2:00 after you moved to noon, people arrive at 1:15 to a locked door, and they won't blame software.

Give every entry an owner and a date. One habit does most of the work: whenever a price list, a schedule or a staff member changes, the same person updates the base that day. Then once a quarter, read every entry aloud in a meeting. Twenty entries take about 15 minutes, and somebody will say "we stopped doing that in spring" at least once.

Keep policy documents out of it. A 12-page cancellation policy pasted in whole gives an assistant 12 pages to misquote. Write the two sentences you'd want said out loud and leave the rest in the binder.

GreetKeeper answers from the brief you write. Your hours, your services, the prices you are happy to quote out loud.

Where something is not covered, the call goes to a person rather than to a guess, and the transcript shows you what was asked.

That makes the first two weeks a listening exercise. Read the handovers, add the answers, and the handover rate falls because you fixed the brief.