Setting Up Your AI Receptionist — Step by Step
The AI Receptionist is usually the first thing tradies set up in TradieCEO, because it fixes the most painful problem immediately: calls that go to voicemail while you're up a ladder or under a house. Here's how to get it answering exactly the way you would, in under half an hour.
Before you start
Setup goes faster if you've got a few things sorted first: your standard business hours (including whether you take after-hours emergency calls), a rough idea of your service area or the suburbs you cover, and a plain-English answer to 'what do you actually charge for a call-out'. You don't need exact pricing for every job type — the AI just needs enough to give a straight answer instead of a vague one.
Step 1 — Connect your business phone number
In Settings, connect the number your customers already call. You can either port your existing number across or forward it to your AI Receptionist line — most tradies choose forwarding so nothing changes from the customer's side. Calls that come in are answered by the AI in real Australian conversation, not a robotic menu tree.
Step 2 — Train the AI on your business
This is the part that actually makes it sound like you, not a generic call centre. Add your services, your pricing basics, your service area, and any rules that matter — like whether you do emergency call-outs, minimum job sizes, or suburbs you don't travel to. The more specific you are here, the fewer calls get escalated unnecessarily.
- List the services you offer and roughly what they cost
- Set your service area and any travel surcharges
- Note your standard hours and after-hours policy
- Add any FAQs customers ask on nearly every call
Step 3 — Set your escalation rules
Not every call should be fully handled by the AI, and it's not supposed to be. Decide what gets a text notification to you versus what needs an immediate phone interrupt — most tradies set genuine emergencies (burst pipes, no power, no hot water) to notify immediately, while routine bookings and quote requests just land in your queue for you to review when you're free.
You stay in control of every job. The AI qualifies the caller, captures their details and the job type, and books it in — it doesn't make final calls on anything you haven't told it to.
Step 4 — Test it like a customer would
Before you go live, call your own number from a phone that isn't saved in your contacts. Ask a real question a customer might ask — pricing for a common job, whether you cover a specific suburb, how soon you can come out. This is the fastest way to catch anything that needs a tweak before a real customer hits it.
Common first-week tweaks
Most adjustments in the first week are small: refining how a specific service is described, adding a suburb that got missed, or changing when a call gets escalated to you directly. Every call is logged with a transcript, so you can review what came in and fine-tune the AI's answers as real calls start coming through — it gets sharper the more it's used.
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