Lilach Bullock runs a one-person consultancy — no assistant, no office manager, just her between client calls, writing, and school pickup. Her phone rang with 15 to 20 unscheduled calls a week: prospects who found her through a podcast, journalists, suppliers chasing invoices. Every call she missed went to a generic voicemail she had recorded in 2019 and never updated.
So she ran an experiment. She picked an AI phone-answering tool built for small businesses, forwarded her business number to it, and spent about 40 minutes on setup. Then she let the AI answer every single call for exactly 30 days — no exceptions, no "just this once" pickups.
The system logged 118 calls. It filtered 34 spam and sales-bot calls before they ever reached her day. The AI answered 61 genuine questions on its own — availability, pricing, "do you do X." Of 23 calls that needed a human, it forwarded 19 to her mobile within seconds. Only 4 got misrouted. On the calls that mattered, the AI hit 90%. Her own answer rate over the three months before the test was closer to 55%.
The numbers won her over, but the biggest win surprised her: transcripts. Every call landed in a dashboard as text, which gave her the exact words prospects use to describe their problems — raw material she turned into website copy and clear answers for AI search engines.
Honesty check: the AI nearly cost her a client on day 12. A referred prospect called, heard a polished, slightly corporate voice asking standard qualifying questions, and hung up. She nearly concluded she had reached a call centre instead of a real business. Bullock fixed it by rewriting the script in her own voice from scratch: her name in the first line, "I'll get back to you personally" instead of "a team member will follow up," and zero jargon. The complaints stopped after that.
The lesson lands exactly where we see it with every local business we install AI for: the technology works — the script makes it human. Write the words you would actually say, set hard escalation rules for anything sensitive, and read your transcripts every week.
We build AI receptionists that answer like you — plain-English reports every morning, appointments in your calendar, your name in the first line. Book a free 15-minute walkthrough and see what your missed calls are really worth.