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This is the setup for having every call answered, day or night, with proper messages taken and urgent calls passed straight to you. It takes an afternoon to build and about a week of listening to real calls to get right. It is the job most businesses hire Brilo for first, because a missed call is usually a lost customer.

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What this setup does for you

Your agent answers every call, works out what the caller needs, answers the questions it can from your own material, takes a proper message when it cannot, and puts urgent callers through to a person. You get a written record and a summary of every call, so nothing depends on somebody remembering to write it down.

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What good looks like

  • Every call answered, including the ones that arrive while you are with a customer.
  • Messages that are actually useful: a name, a number, what they wanted, and when they need it by.
  • Urgent calls reaching you within a minute, rather than sitting in a voicemail box.
  • No caller told something untrue. An agent that says “let me take a message” is better than one that guesses at your prices.

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What to put in your instructions

Paste this into your agent’s Prompt tab and change everything in square brackets. See Write what your agent says.
The two lines that matter most are your definition of urgent and the instruction never to quote a price that is not in your knowledge. Those two prevent most of what goes wrong.

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What your agent needs to know

Upload these, in this order. See Add a document or website.
  1. Your services and what each involves. In the words your customers use, not your internal names.
  2. Your prices, or how pricing works when it varies. If you cannot publish prices, upload the explanation your team gives on the phone.
  3. Your opening hours, including holidays.
  4. Your existing FAQs, which are already written and already in customer language. See Use your existing FAQs.
  5. Your location and directions, including parking, which people ring about more than you would expect.

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What to let your agent do

Do not add more than these to begin with. Every extra action is another decision your agent makes mid call.

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What to test before you go live

Call your own agent and run these six. See Test your agent yourself.
  1. Your most common question. Does it answer from your material, correctly?
  2. A price question. Does it give your real price, or refuse cleanly?
  3. “Can I speak to someone?” Does the transfer happen, and does your phone actually ring?
  4. A question it cannot possibly know. Does it take a message instead of inventing an answer?
  5. An urgent call, in the words a real customer would use. Does it skip the message and transfer?
  6. A caller who mumbles or talks over it. Does it cope, or interrupt?
Then check the message it took. If you would not be able to act on it, the message instructions need work.

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Rules to know

  • Recording. Some places require you to tell callers a call is recorded. See Telling callers they are recorded.
  • Saying it is an AI. You control what your agent says about itself, and some places require disclosure. The agents that go down best do not pretend when asked directly.

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FAQ

For answering calls, taking messages, and putting urgent callers through, yes, and it does it every hour of the day rather than only when your service is staffed. What a human service still does better is handling a caller who is upset and needs judgement, which is why the transfer action matters in this setup.
The message is on the call record with a summary, and you can have it texted or emailed to you as the call ends, or written into your CRM. Set that up rather than relying on somebody checking the dashboard.
Yes. Your agent does not have hours of its own, so it answers whenever a call arrives. You can also have it behave differently out of hours. See Business hours and after hours.
Both are answered. Your agent holds several conversations at once, 15 on paid self serve plans, so a burst of calls does not produce an engaged tone. See Limits.
Only as well as you define urgent. Write the actual words your customers use, for example “no heating” or “flooding” or “in pain”, rather than the word “urgent”. That single instruction does most of the work in this setup.
Yes, using a message action that runs once the call has ended, so the caller never waits for it. See Send a text or email.
Your plan plus any minutes beyond it. A business taking 200 calls of about three minutes fits inside Pro at $149 a month with nothing extra. See What will this cost me.
Some will, and the two things that decide it are whether your agent actually helps and whether it puts them through when they ask. An agent that answers the question beats a voicemail box. An agent that refuses to fetch a human annoys everyone.
Yes. A common arrangement is forwarding your business number to Brilo only when nobody picks up, which your phone provider can usually do. See Use your existing number.
An afternoon to build and test, then about a week of listening to real calls and fixing what you hear. The listening is what turns a working agent into a good one. See Your first week.