Adding Receptionist Instructions

The Instructions stage is the fourth step in Receptionist Setup.

This stage allows you to give Cognivox specific instructions about how your AI receptionist should handle calls and customer enquiries for your business.

These instructions complement the general call-handling settings configured earlier and allow you to define rules that are specific to your organisation.

What are Receptionist Instructions?

Receptionist Instructions describe how you want the AI receptionist to behave when particular situations occur.

They can cover areas such as:

• Sales enquiries
• Customer support
• Appointment enquiries
• Billing enquiries
• Message taking
• Call transfers
• Escalation
• Information to collect from callers
• Security requirements
• Urgent enquiries
• Situations requiring human follow-up

The instructions should focus primarily on what you want the receptionist to do rather than general information about your company.

General company information will be added during the later Company Overview, FAQs, Products and Services and Additional Information stages.

Suggested instructions

Cognivox may provide suggested instructions based on the receptionist template you selected earlier.

These suggestions can help you identify useful instructions for your type of business.

Select the suggestions that are relevant to your organisation.

The selected information will be added to Your Information, where you can review and edit it.

Suggestions are starting points only.

Remove or change anything that does not accurately represent how your business operates.

Your Information

The Your Information area contains the source information that Cognivox will use to generate your final receptionist instructions.

You can:

• Type your own instructions
• Use suggested instructions
• Modify suggestions
• Remove instructions that do not apply
• Add additional business-specific requirements

Try to describe clearly what should happen when a particular type of enquiry is received.

Handling different types of enquiries

Consider how you want Cognivox to handle the common enquiries received by your business.

For example:

Sales enquiries

You might instruct the receptionist to:

• Identify what the caller is interested in
• Collect appropriate contact information
• Answer questions using available company information
• Offer an appointment or demonstration where appropriate
• Arrange human follow-up when required

Existing customer enquiries

You might want Cognivox to collect:

• Caller name
• Company name
• Telephone number
• Email address
• Relevant account or enquiry information
• A concise description of the issue

Only request information that is genuinely required.

Appointment enquiries

You can specify how appointment enquiries should be handled.

Cognivox should check the appropriate availability information before offering or confirming an appointment.

Do not instruct the receptionist to assume that an employee is available.

Billing enquiries

Billing instructions can explain what information should be collected and when an enquiry requires human assistance.

Avoid instructing the receptionist to disclose sensitive account or payment information without appropriate safeguards.

Urgent enquiries

If some types of enquiries require special handling, describe this clearly.

For example, a technology company might treat complete service unavailability as more urgent than a general product enquiry.

Your instructions can specify:

• What constitutes an urgent enquiry
• What information should be collected
• Whether the enquiry requires escalation
• What the receptionist should tell the caller

Do not include response-time guarantees unless your business has explicitly defined them and you want the receptionist to communicate them.

Security instructions

Receptionist Instructions are a useful place to define important security rules.

For example:

Never ask a caller to provide passwords, authentication codes, API keys, secret keys or complete payment-card information.

Consider whether your business has additional information that should never be requested or disclosed.

Information the receptionist does not know

Your instructions should make clear that Cognivox must not invent information.

If the information required to answer an enquiry is unavailable, the receptionist should explain this naturally and offer an appropriate next step.

Depending on your configuration, this might include:

• Taking a message
• Collecting contact details
• Arranging an appointment
• Suggesting human follow-up

Do not instruct Cognivox to guess:

• Prices
• Availability
• Technical information
• Account information
• Delivery dates
• Response times
• Resolution times
• Refunds
• Service guarantees

unless the required information is explicitly available to the receptionist.

Keep instructions actionable

The most useful receptionist instructions explain what the receptionist should actually do.

For example, instead of:

Technical support is very important to our company.

use:

For technical support enquiries, collect the caller's name, company, telephone number, email address and a concise description of the problem.

This gives the AI receptionist a clear action to follow.

Avoid duplicating company knowledge

Receptionist Instructions should primarily describe behaviour and procedures.

You do not need to place all of your company information in this section.

The following setup stages are designed for that information:

• Overview — what your company does
• FAQs — answers to common customer questions
• Services — your products and services
• Additional — other useful company information

Keeping these areas separate makes your Cognivox configuration easier to understand and maintain.

Generate with AI

When you are satisfied with Your Information, select Generate with AI.

Cognivox will use your information to produce structured receptionist instructions.

The result will appear in the Generated Content area.

Generated Content

The Generated Content is the final version of the Receptionist Instructions that will be saved for use by your AI receptionist.

Review this section carefully.

You can edit the generated content before continuing.

Check that the generated instructions:

• Accurately represent your business
• Give clear actions to the receptionist
• Do not contain invented policies
• Do not make unsupported promises
• Do not request inappropriate sensitive information
• Correctly describe escalation requirements
• Correctly describe when human follow-up is required

If something is incorrect, edit the Generated Content before continuing.

Your Information versus Generated Content

It is important to understand the difference between the two areas.

Your Information

This is the source material supplied to the AI generator.

Generated Content

This is the final structured receptionist instruction content.

The Generated Content is the information saved for use by your Cognivox receptionist.

Always review the Generated Content rather than assuming that generated instructions are automatically correct.

Review your instructions

Before continuing, check:

• Common enquiry types are covered.
• Caller information requirements are appropriate.
• Appointment handling is correct.
• Escalation requirements are clear.
• Security requirements are included where necessary.
• Unknown information is handled appropriately.
• The receptionist is not being instructed to invent information.
• Generated Content contains the final instructions you want the receptionist to follow.

Continue to the next stage

When you are satisfied with the Generated Content, select Continue.

Your final Receptionist Instructions will be saved and you can proceed to the Overview stage, where you will provide information describing your company.