Behind the build
Why our agent refuses to guess a price
An early build invented a call-out fee that no account had ever set. The rule we wrote in response is now the one we would keep if we could keep only one.
6 min read
A caller asked what it would cost to come out on a Sunday. The agent said a hundred and forty dollars. Nobody had told it that. It was a plausible number for the trade and the region, and it was entirely invented.
The owner found out when the customer arrived at that price and the invoice said something else. That is a small disaster to hand someone who trusted you with their phone line.
Plausible is not the same as true
The instinct when building this is to make the agent helpful, and a helpful assistant fills gaps. But a front desk that guesses is worse than one that says it doesn't know, because a guess is indistinguishable from a fact at the speed a phone call moves.
A wrong answer costs you more than a missed one. The missed one you can still recover.
What we changed
- Prices, dates and policies come from your profile or they don't get said.
- When the profile has no answer, the agent says so plainly and takes the question down.
- The unanswered question becomes a knowledge gap on your desk, so you answer it once and never again.
The result is an agent that occasionally sounds less impressive on a call and is never wrong about your business. That trade is not close.