Service · AI receptionist NZ
An assistant that answers the enquiries arriving after hours and in the busy times, from your own prices, policies and availability, and hands anything it can't settle to a real person. Built and supported from Auckland.
Most of what lands on a front desk is the same twenty questions. Are you open on Saturday. How much is it. Have you got anything free next week. Where do I park. A receptionist answers them all day, and the ones that arrive at 9pm wait until morning.
An AI receptionist takes that first layer. In practice it does four jobs:
What it must not do matters just as much. The guest assistant I've built for a holiday park, now in client testing, never changes a booking. It tells a guest what's free and what it costs, but any change goes to reception through a staff dashboard. That one rule removes most of the ways it could go wrong.
People asking for an AI receptionist usually picture the phone. Phone is possible, and I'll build it where the call volume justifies it, but for most small businesses I'd start with the written channels:
Whichever channel you start with, the knowledge underneath is the same, so adding the inbox or the phone later is a config change rather than a rebuild.
They should, and the receptionists I build say so up front. A prospect asked me this after being called back by an AI agent and not realising until later. A customer who feels tricked is worse off than one who waited until morning.
There's a legal side too. The Fair Trading Act prohibits misleading conduct in trade, and the Privacy Act expects you to tell people when you're collecting their personal information and what it's for. A clear line at the start of the chat or call covers both, along with an easy way to reach a person. If you're in a regulated industry, check the wording with your adviser.
The accuracy defences are the same ones I use on every chatbot; the AI chatbots page goes through them in more detail.
Most AI receptionist builds sit in the NZ$3,000 to $12,000 range on my pricing page, fixed before anything is built. The low end is website chat answering from your own information; the high end adds live availability, the inbox and a staff dashboard. The phone adds to both the build and the running cost, so I'd only quote it once the written channels show what people actually ask.
After that there's a monthly bill for hosting and AI usage. The running costs guide works through what those look like in NZ dollars.
An AI assistant that answers the routine enquiries a front desk handles, on website chat, email or the phone, from your own information, and hands anything else to a person with the conversation attached.
Yes. A voice agent can answer calls, deal with routine questions and take details. It costs more to run and needs more testing than chat, so I build it where calls are the main channel and most of them are routine, usually after the written channels are working.
You should. The Fair Trading Act prohibits misleading conduct and the Privacy Act expects you to tell people when you collect their information. The receptionists I build say they're an AI at the start and offer a way to reach a person.
It can check availability and take a booking request. Whether it confirms bookings itself or passes them to staff is your call. For changes and cancellations I recommend it always hands over.
Most builds are NZ$3,000 to $12,000, fixed before anything is built, plus monthly hosting and AI usage. Discovery is always free. Prices exclude GST.
Send me the ten questions your front desk answers most. On a free 30-minute call I'll tell you how many of them an AI receptionist could handle, and what it would cost.
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