How to Set Up an AI Receptionist for Your Trade Showroom

What the AI Receptionist actually does

IBIOS Receptionist (coming soon) will be a phone-based AI agent. When a customer calls your business number, the agent will answer, identify the caller’s need, and resolve it without routing the call to a staff member — unless the situation requires human involvement.

The four things it is designed to handle for trade showrooms are: stock availability queries (is that bath still in stock?), job status checks (when is my installation?), appointment booking (can I come in for a consultation?), and general opening hours and directions. For each of these, the agent will query your live IBIOS data before responding. It will not read from a static script or a snapshot of your website; it will check the actual current state of your business.

Outside your opening hours, the agent will answer when your team can’t pick up. A caller at 9pm asking about a delivery will get a real answer from live order data. A caller wanting to book a survey will be able to do so without waiting for the showroom to open. For a trade business where customers include contractors planning jobs at the end of their working day, this out-of-hours availability (coming soon) will have practical value.

What you configure before going live

Setup will involve three categories of configuration: business identity, phone number, and response rules.

Business identity covers your trading name, address, opening hours, and a brief description of your trade type (bathroom showroom, tile retailer, bathroom and tile combined, plumbing supplies). The agent uses this to introduce itself correctly and to answer basic questions about your business. This is the quickest part of setup.

Phone number setup (coming soon) will mean either porting your existing number or provisioning a new one. How long number porting takes depends on your current provider; provisioning a new number and forwarding existing calls to it is usually quicker. We expect most showrooms to start with a forwarded number while the port completes.

Response rules are the most important configuration step. These define how the agent handles specific scenarios: what to say when someone calls about an installation problem, when to transfer immediately to a staff member, how to respond to a call outside hours when the query is urgent. Invest time here — a well-configured set of escalation rules is what separates a useful AI receptionist from an annoying one.

What the AI knows natively — and what you need to tell it

Because IBIOS Receptionist (coming soon) will be part of the IBIOS platform, it will have direct read access to your IBIOS data. It will know your product catalogue (you import your own catalogue into IBIOS), current job statuses, supplier order arrival dates, customer records, and appointment availability. You will not need to feed it this information separately.

What you do need to tell it — because it cannot derive this from your data — is your business’s specific way of handling certain situations. For example: do you handle installation callouts directly, or do you refer customers to their original installer? What is your process when a customer has a complaint about a delivered product? Who handles trade account applications? These are business decisions, not data queries, and the agent needs them written as explicit response rules.

A useful exercise before going live is to write down the most common call types your showroom receives and draft the correct response to each. That list becomes the foundation of your response rules and prevents the most common customer frustrations.

How will IBIOS Receptionist be priced?

IBIOS Receptionist is coming soon and its pricing has not been decided yet. Founding prices for waiting-list members are explained on the pricing page. IBIOS products can be used on their own or together.

Whatever the final pricing, it helps to know your own call pattern before you compare any AI receptionist with what you use today. Your phone provider's call logs will show how many calls you get, when they arrive, and how many go unanswered. With that picture you can compare options on your own figures rather than on a vendor's example.

Going live: parallel run mode

IBIOS Receptionist (coming soon) will support a parallel run mode designed to reduce go-live risk. In parallel mode, the AI agent will handle calls on a separate test number while your existing line stays live and staffed as normal. You call the test number yourself, run through your common scenarios, listen to how the agent responds, and adjust the configuration until you are satisfied.

When you are happy with the agent’s behaviour, you will switch the main number over. We suggest a short parallel test before going live, and a longer one if you have complex escalation rules or a large team who need to understand how the handover process works.

Call transcripts will be available in your IBIOS dashboard from the start of the parallel run. Reviewing the first batch of transcripts is the quickest way to identify gaps in your response rules before the agent is handling your main business line.