AI voice agents
How to choose an AI voice agent for your business
Voice agents are often sold as AI receptionists, so these are also the questions to ask an AI receptionist provider. This checklist is written for South African businesses comparing providers, and each section gives the question to ask and what a good answer sounds like.
The best AI voice agent for a small business is the one that fails safely, so most of these questions are about failure. Price is left out on purpose, because comparing quotes is easy once you know who can do the job. If you're still deciding whether you need one at all, start with how to stop missing customer calls.
What happens when a caller needs a person?
A good voice agent hands the call over without making the caller start again. When someone can take the call, the agent puts it through to the right phone. When nobody can, it books a callback and sends a written summary, so whoever rings back already knows who called and what they wanted.
Ask the provider to walk you through the handover step by step:
- Whose phone does a transfer ring, and what does the agent do if nobody answers?
- Can a caller ask for a person at any point and get one?
- Does the person taking over see a summary before they speak, or pick up cold?
- Which calls skip the agent's attempt and go straight to a person?
You'll write that last list yourself, and a good provider will push you to. A customer disputing an invoice, a caller who is clearly upset and any question that needs a professional's judgement belong on it, because they're the calls an AI receptionist should never handle alone. Your business will have calls of its own to add.
Say you run an electrical contracting business in Midrand. An agent can book certificate of compliance inspections all day. A caller whose DB board is sparking needs your standby electrician on the line now, not a booking for Thursday.
Test the handover yourself in the demo. Ask for a person halfway through a booking and see what happens. A provider whose answer stops at "it can transfer calls" hasn't planned for the evening when nobody picks up.
What can it read and change in your systems?
Only what the provider connects it to, so get the exact list of systems it will read from and the ones it will write into. An agent that can see your calendar but can't book into it is a message-taker with a nicer voice. The vendor questions in our AI agent vs chatbot guide apply here too.
Voice adds problems of its own, because everything happens while the caller waits. Ask these as well:
- Does it check for a free slot during the call, or take a request and hope?
- What does it say if your calendar or CRM stops responding mid-call? It should take the details, promise a callback and alert someone, not leave the caller in dead air.
- Will it answer on your existing number, with calls forwarded to it, or on a new one?
- If the platform goes down, where do your calls go?
Find out whose accounts it all runs on, and what you keep if you leave. You'll want your recordings, your transcripts and the answers you wrote, and ideally the number too.
Will it understand the way your customers speak?
Only a test with your own callers will tell you. Find out which South African languages the provider has tested on real calls, rather than which ones appear on its feature list.
Ask who listens to calls in each language once the agent is live, and how problems reach you. Ask what the agent does when it can't follow a caller. Saying so and offering a person is fine. Guessing and carrying on is not.
Listen to how it speaks, too: how it says your business name, your suburb and the names of your products. An agent that mispronounces the business it works for sounds like a stranger answering your phone.
Our guide to whether an AI chatbot or voice agent can speak Afrikaans and isiZulu explains how to test language quality before you commit, code-switching included.
Where do call recordings and transcripts end up?
Wherever the provider's platform stores them, and that may not be in South Africa. You need to know where every recording, transcript and call summary is kept, who can open it and when it's deleted. In POPIA's terms, your business is the responsible party for what callers tell the agent, and a provider handling it on your behalf under a contract or mandate counts as an operator.
These parts of the Protection of Personal Information Act bear directly on a voice agent:
- Section 18 requires reasonably practicable steps to make callers aware of what you're collecting and why, among other things, before you collect it from them. On a phone line, that belongs in the greeting.
- Section 21 requires a written contract obliging the operator to establish and maintain the security measures in section 19. The operator must also tell you immediately when there are reasonable grounds to believe an unauthorised person has accessed or acquired the information.
- Section 72 restricts sending personal information to a third party in a foreign country unless a condition it lists is met. If recordings are stored outside South Africa, ask which protections apply, and check the answer with your adviser.
- Section 69 restricts direct marketing by electronic communication, including "automatic calling machines", which it defines as machines able to make automated calls without human intervention. If the agent will make outbound sales calls, read it first.
Add these to your list as well. Can you delete a recording when a caller asks you to? Does the provider use your calls to train or improve its own systems?
Our POPIA guide covers operator agreements and retention in more depth. None of this is legal advice. If your callers share sensitive details, have an attorney look over the set-up before it goes live.
How will it be tested before real callers reach it?
It should be tested on a separate number before go-live, against a written list of calls, and you should make those calls yourself with whoever answers your phones now.
Build that list from your own calls. Include the reasons people ring most often and the calls your staff dread. Then add callers who behave the way people do:
- someone who interrupts the agent mid-sentence
- someone who changes the day just as the booking is done
- someone on a weak signal, with a taxi rank behind them
- someone who goes quiet for a while
- someone who asks outright whether they're talking to a person
- someone who tries to talk the agent into a discount
Afterwards, check what each call left behind, not only how it sounded. A call that went smoothly but put the wrong date in your calendar is a failed test. So is a summary sent to an inbox nobody reads.
Ask, too, who decides the agent is ready and what it will handle on its first day. A careful provider starts with the calls that tested cleanly and adds the rest once you've heard it work.
What does it say when it doesn't know the answer?
It should say plainly that it doesn't know, offer to pass the question to a person and leave it there. A confident wrong answer does more harm than admitting it doesn't know, because the caller believes it and acts on it.
Ask to see the material it answers from, and who can change it. You'll want to update it yourself when your trading hours change or you stop offering a service, without logging a ticket and waiting.
Ask what happens to the questions it couldn't answer. A good provider shows you a list, so you add each answer once and the next caller gets it. And check whether it can be told never to quote a price, or to quote only from a list you've approved.
Try to catch it out. Ask about a service you don't offer, or a branch you don't have. If it answers anyway, you've found the problem before a customer did.
How does Cognexa answer these questions?
Some of these we can answer before we know your business.
Anything an AI receptionist or voice agent we build may do without a person is agreed with you in writing first. A call that needs judgement or empathy goes to your team, mid-call if necessary, with the whole conversation passed along. Before launch, its pacing, accent and vocabulary are tuned to your brand, you read through the answers it will give, and we test it.
Language coverage is scoped from your own message history, not from a wish list. A language that matters to your business is checked by native speakers against real transcripts before launch. Where the quality isn't good enough to trust, we tell you, and those calls go to a person.
What should you do before you choose an AI voice agent?
Do the groundwork that makes the providers' answers comparable:
- Go through your recent calls and write down why people rang. That list becomes your test script.
- Write down the calls that must always reach a person, and whose phone each one should ring.
- List the systems the agent would need: your calendar, your CRM, WhatsApp and email.
- Send every provider the same questions from this page, in writing, and compare the answers side by side.
- Make the test calls yourself, on a cellphone, before anything is signed.