Setting up an AI phone agent is closer to onboarding a new receptionist than installing software. This checklist takes most teams from sign-up to live calls in a single working day.
Morning: design the agent
1. Pick the right template
Start from the template closest to your main job: receptionist, appointment booking, customer support or after-hours / overflow. Templates come with sensible instructions, captured fields and closing lines, so you edit rather than write from scratch.
2. Write the opening line
The opening line sets expectations. A good one names the business, says the caller is speaking to an AI assistant and asks how it can help:
“Hi, you’ve reached Northgate Physio. I’m the clinic’s AI assistant — how can I help today?”
For healthcare and other sensitive lines, add a safety instruction such as telling callers to hang up and dial 999 in an emergency.
3. Decide what to capture
List the information your team needs from every call — typically name, phone number, reason for calling and a preferred callback time. Captured fields appear in call logs and can be sent to your systems by webhook when the call ends.
4. Set the boundaries
Tell the agent what it must never do: give medical, legal or financial advice, promise refunds, or quote prices that are not in your documents. Define a fallback, such as “I’ll ask a member of the team to call you back.”
Midday: give it knowledge and tools
5. Upload your documents
Price lists, FAQs, service descriptions, opening hours, parking and policies. Narvin accepts TXT, PDF, DOCX, XLS, XLSX and CSV files, indexes them and uses the relevant passages in each answer. Shorter, well-structured documents give better answers than one huge file.
6. Connect your calendar and tools
Connect Google Calendar so the agent can offer real slots, and Gmail, Outlook, Slack or your CRM so messages reach the right people.
Afternoon: connect, test and go live
7. Connect a phone number
Buy a number in the Telephony settings (Narvin manages the Twilio account for you) and assign it to your agent. Most businesses then forward their existing number — always, when busy, or out of hours — so customers keep dialling the number they know.
8. Run ten test calls
Ask colleagues to call with real scenarios and try to trip it up:
- A simple booking and a reschedule
- A question that is in your documents, and one that is not
- An interruption mid-sentence
- A caller who says nothing
- Someone asking “Am I talking to a robot?”
Read each transcript and adjust the instructions or documents.
9. Go live gradually
Start with after-hours and overflow only. Once you are happy with a week of transcripts, let the agent answer more calls.
Every week after: review and improve
Read a sample of transcripts and AI summaries each week. Look for questions the agent could not answer, calls that ran long and moments where callers sounded confused, then update the script or knowledge base. Small, regular changes make the biggest difference.
Need a hand?
Our team can do the whole setup with you — scripts, knowledge, telephony and go-live checks — so your first calls go smoothly.
