Teaching exact answers with FAQ

Teaching your AI phone assistant is mostly about telling it who you are and what you do. Start in My assistant with the plain-language basics: the services you offer, the prices or ranges you are comfortable sharing on the phone, your opening hours, where you are located, and how you prefer to handle bookings or callbacks. Write this the way you would brief a new colleague on their first morning — full sentences, real detail, nothing assumed. The assistant reads this description and uses it to answer the everyday questions callers actually ask: "Are you open on Saturday?", "Do you do that kind of work?", "How much does it usually cost?", "Where are you?"

For most of these questions, a natural, slightly-varied answer is exactly what you want. The assistant phrases things in its own words, adapts to how the caller asked, and sounds like a real person rather than a recording. That flexibility is a feature — it keeps conversations warm and human. But there is a second category of question where flexibility is the last thing you want, and that is what FAQ entries are for.

Some answers have to be exact, every single time. Your cancellation and no-show policy. The deposit you take and what is refundable. Parking and access instructions for a tricky address. Whether you accept a particular insurance. The brands, models, or treatments you specifically do and do not offer. For anything like this, a creative paraphrase is not charming — it is a liability. A reworded cancellation policy can turn into a dispute; a vague answer about insurance can send the wrong patient to your door.

This is where the FAQ section earns its place. Open My assistant → FAQ and add question-and-answer pairs in your own words. Each pair is a question a caller might ask, paired with the exact answer you want spoken back. Keep the question phrased the way real people say it out loud, not in formal jargon, and write the answer as the final word on the matter — concise, complete, and ready to be read aloud.

FAQ entries carry the highest priority in how the assistant decides what to say. When a caller asks something that matches or comes close to one of your FAQ questions, the assistant answers with your text — word for word, with no improvisation and no embellishment. It will not soften it, expand it, or guess at the parts you left out. What you wrote is what the caller hears. That is the whole point: predictable, repeatable, on-the-record answers for the things that matter.

So how do you decide what belongs in the FAQ versus the general description? A simple test works well. If you find yourself saying the same sentence on the phone several times a day, it probably deserves an FAQ entry so it is always phrased the way you like. If an answer has legal, financial, or safety weight, it belongs in the FAQ so the wording never drifts. And if a loose paraphrase of the answer could cause a complaint, a refund argument, or a missed expectation, lock it down with an FAQ pair. Everything else — the friendly, low-stakes back-and-forth — is fine to leave to the assistant's general understanding of your business.

A good rhythm is to set up the broad description first, listen to a few real or test calls, and then notice which questions keep coming up or which answers you wish had been worded differently. Turn those into FAQ entries one at a time. Over a week or two you will end up with a short, sharp list that covers your genuine trouble spots, while the assistant handles the long tail of ordinary questions naturally. The result is an assistant that sounds human where it should and quotes you precisely where it must — answering exactly what you set, in exactly the words you chose.