AI & automation / Checklist
Your AI receptionist is live. What should you check each month?
Picture a caller who asks for an appointment, hears a helpful answer and hangs up. The review needs to establish whether an appointment was saved, an enquiry is waiting for someone, or nothing reached the diary.
That is where I would start a monthly review. The call is part of a working process, and the business needs to know what still needs doing.
Start with the calls that need a person
Look for requests waiting for a reply, failed handovers and cases the assistant could not resolve. Give those items a named person and a next step before spending the meeting discussing a headline call count.
Choose a review frequency that fits the service. A monthly meeting can organise improvements, while an urgent failed action may need attention much sooner. Agree that route when the receptionist goes live.
Compare the conversation with the saved result
Take an authorised sample and check the records it was meant to produce. For a booking, inspect the saved appointment. For an enquiry, find the actual request and its owner. Keep customer recordings and personal details within the agreed access and retention arrangements.
Retell’s post-call extraction reads a transcript with a language model and produces summaries or classifications. Its successful-call field follows configured criteria. Those can help organise a review, but a summary saying someone booked does not independently prove a calendar write completed.
Check missing analysis as well as unfavourable analysis. Retell notes that custom extraction fields are not populated where a call did not connect or no conversation took place.
| Illustrative review item | Evidence to inspect |
|---|---|
| Appointment requested | Saved diary entry or an explicit unresolved request |
| Handover attempted | Transfer result and the caller’s next step |
| Question unanswered | The source information and the reply given |
| Follow-up needed | A recorded task with a responsible person |
Source: Retell: post-call extraction
Use alerts to bring changes to attention
Look at function failures, transfer failures and unexpected changes in usage or cost. Investigate what changed before deciding what a number means; a quieter week and an unavailable service can both reduce call volume.
Retell’s alert rules can watch configured metrics over a time window. They cover aggregate patterns, rather than acting as a response to every individual call. Set an owner and a sensible route for alerts instead of treating a dashboard as someone’s responsibility by default.
Source: Retell: alert rules
Turn the review into a short action list
For each issue, keep the observed problem, the expected result and the person handling it. A missing knowledge item needs different work from an unavailable calendar connection.
After a correction, repeat the relevant case in a controlled test and retain it for future checks. Keep the expected result beside the issue so the next review can establish whether it was resolved.
Sources
Checked on 23 October 2026.
- Retell: post-call extraction
Transcript-derived analysis, configured success criteria and missing custom fields where no conversation occurred.
- Retell: alert rules
Configured aggregate metric alerts over a window, distinct from single-call handling.