There are now hundreds of agencies in the UK selling AI voice agents, AI receptionists, and chatbots. Many of them are good. Some are reselling the same platform with a new logo and a monthly fee on top. From the outside, their proposals look almost identical.
These ten questions separate them. Ask every agency you speak to, including us, and compare the answers.
1. Who owns the agent, the phone number, and the data?
The answer you want: everything sits in accounts in your business's name, and you could change agency without rebuilding. The answer that should worry you: the agent lives in the agency's platform account, the number is theirs, and leaving means starting again.
2. What exactly does the monthly fee pay for?
Ask for the monthly fee broken down into platform licence, usage, support, and margin. Usage-based costs such as telephony and the language model are real and unavoidable. A large fixed fee with no clear explanation is usually a platform subscription you could hold yourself.
3. What will it cost in total for our first year?
Set-up, monthly fees, usage at your expected call or message volume, overage rates, integration work, and VAT. A good agency estimates usage for your volume before you sign. A vague answer here is how small monthly prices become large annual bills.
4. Can it work with our booking system or CRM, and how?
Integration is where most of the value is. Ask whether the connection is a written, tested integration or a no-code connector, what happens when your system is slow or down, and whether they have checked your specific software. An honest answer sometimes includes no, it does not have an API.
5. How do you test it before it goes live?
The answer you want: a set of real scenarios from your business, including awkward ones, run against the agent before launch and again after every change. The answer that should worry you: a demo call and then go live.
6. What happens when it does not know the answer?
Every AI agent will meet questions it cannot answer. You want it to say so and hand over to a person, or take a complete message, rather than guess. Ask to hear or see an example of a handover.
7. Will customers be told they are speaking to an AI?
The answer should be yes. Being upfront costs nothing, customers are more patient with an AI that is honest about what it is, and it is where UK and EU expectations are heading.
8. Where does our customers' data go, and is it used for training?
Ask which providers process the recordings, transcripts, or messages, whether any of them train on your data, how long it is kept, and who can access it. Calls and chats are personal data under UK GDPR, and sometimes sensitive data. An agency that cannot answer clearly has not thought about it.
9. How do we see what it is doing?
You should be able to read transcripts, see why calls were handed over, and track how many conversations it resolved. If the only report is a monthly number of calls answered, you will not know whether it is working.
10. Would a cheaper off-the-shelf product do this job?
This is the most revealing question. For simple message taking, a ready-made AI receptionist subscription at tens of pounds a month is often enough. An agency that tells you so is one you can trust with the bigger jobs. An agency that says every problem needs a custom agent is selling, not advising.
Our answers
For the record: everything we build sits in accounts in your name; you get a fixed build price and pay usage directly to providers at cost; integrations are written and tested as code; agents are tested against real scenarios before launch; they say they are AI and hand over when they should; and we will tell you on the first call if a cheaper product would do.