Every demo call you will be shown was designed to go well

What our free tier actually is

It is $0, needs no card, and gives you the Quality Studio: you configure the agent with your real services, your real prices, your working hours and your escalation rules, and then talk to it in the browser with 30 minutes of studio time.

It does not include a phone number, and it therefore cannot answer a real customer. That is a genuine limitation rather than a formality, and stating it here costs us some sign-ups from people who wanted a free answering service. We would rather lose those than have somebody discover it after configuring an agent.

Paid plans start at $99 a month and that is where a real number is claimed.

Test one: ask it something it should refuse

Ask it to diagnose a fault. Ask what a repair will cost. Ask it to confirm whether a named person is a customer. A vendor's demo will never show you this, and it is the most informative sixty seconds you can spend.

What you want to hear is a specific sentence, a reason and a next step, rather than a vague deflection or, worse, a confident answer. A confident wrong answer given to your customer, in your business's name, is the actual risk in this purchase.

Test two: change a price, then ring it again

If your call-out fee is configuration, you can change it at eight in the evening and the next call quotes the new one. If it is buried in a prompt that a vendor's team maintains, you are raising a support ticket and waiting.

This one question separates a product you operate from a service you are a customer of, and it is the difference you will feel every week for as long as you use it.

Test three: interrupt it, and talk over it

Real callers interrupt. They start a sentence, stop, change their mind, and hand the phone to somebody else mid-call. A scripted demo never does any of this and every voice agent handles it differently.

While you are there, switch language mid-sentence if that happens on your phone. In most trades in the US it does, and a system that requires a menu selection for Spanish has already lost that caller.

Test four: check what happens when nobody answers the transfer

Have it try to transfer to a number you deliberately do not pick up. A well-built escalation requires a keypress to accept, so a voicemail box cannot silently swallow the call, and the fallback is a specific callback commitment rather than a beep.

This is the path that runs at two in the morning, which is exactly when you will not be watching.

Test five: read the pricing page again, looking for the meter

Not the headline number. The unit. Per call, per minute, per receptionist minute or flat. Then work out what your worst month looks like on it: the week of the storm, the week the listing went live, the week of the freeze.

Three of those four meters produce their largest bill in precisely that week. Our answering service cost page has each vendor's published figures side by side.