The questions your receptionist cannot guess

Every one of those callers is asking the same kind of question. Not "what do you do", which any brochure answers, but "does what you do apply to me, here, today". That is a question about facts, and your receptionist can only answer it from facts you gave it.

Get them wrong and it is not one bad call. It is every call, in the same way, until someone notices.

Where the facts actually live

In the portal they sit in two places, and the difference matters.

Info › Company Information holds your billing address, website, phone and fax. Four fields. It is what your account is, not what your receptionist says.

Call Handling Setup › Manage Knowledge is what your receptionist answers with. Your services, your prices, what it must ask, and what it must never promise. Hours, service area and the questions callers repeat go on the Frequently Asked Questions card beside it.

Your address needs to be in both. The company record is your account; the knowledge base is what a caller hears. Enter it twice and they agree. Enter it once and one of them is wrong.

What this changes on the call

A receptionist without the facts is not silent. It is vague, which is worse, because vague sounds like a business that does not know its own answers.

With the service area in the knowledge base, "do you come out to Corolla" gets a yes or a no on the call. Without it, the caller gets a message taken and a promise that someone will ring back.

With the trip charge written down, the caller hears the number before they book. Without it, they hear it when the van arrives, which is where cancellations and chargebacks come from.

With the after-hours path per building, an 11pm burst pipe reaches the person who is actually on call. Without it, it reaches whoever is listed first, or nobody.

The pattern holds every time. A fact in the knowledge base is a decision the caller gets on the call. A fact that is missing is a decision that becomes your job, later, with less information than the receptionist had.

Write it like a brief, not a website

The knowledge base is not marketing copy. Write it the way you would brief a new hire on their first morning.

Say what it must ask. Outerbanks HVAC tells it to ask whether the caller is new or existing, because the answer changes everything after it.

Say the numbers plainly. The $89 diagnostic visit is a fact, so it goes in as a fact.

Say what it must not promise. "Never promise an arrival time nobody has confirmed" is as important as anything it may say, and it is the line most people forget to write.

Already have this in a document? You can upload a PDF, and it still uses the text you wrote. Already have your questions in a spreadsheet? The FAQ card takes a CSV, two columns, question and answer.

How you find out what is missing

You do not have to guess, and guessing is how these lists go stale.

Every question your receptionist could not answer lands on the Unanswered questions screen. That screen is the shortest honest to-do list you will get: each row is a real caller asking a real thing, and each one becomes an FAQ.

Read it weekly for the first month. The service area question you never thought to write down will be on it, because it was the first thing the caller asked.