What we have worked out so far
Comparisons with our own prices in the table, the questions worth asking any vendor including us, and one post per trade on the calls that go wrong. Every figure about another company is sourced and dated, and every figure about your own business is arithmetic on an assumption we state.
how these are written
Rules we hold ourselves to here
- No figure about another company without a primary source and the date it was read. Pricing pages change; a comparison quoting a number nobody can check is an advert.
- No invented customers. There are no case studies, no testimonials and no results on this site, because there is nobody to quote yet and a fabricated one would be worth less than nothing.
- No comparison we come out of unscathed. Our own prices are in the table, and where somebody else is the better answer for you, the post says so.
- No behaviour we have not built. The trade posts describe what our agents are actually briefed to say and refuse in that trade, and a test holds each post to the brief behind it.
“Is Maya in on Saturday?” — the two calls a salon diary cannot answer
Two questions arrive on every salon and barbershop phone line, and neither of them is a booking. Here is what the honest answer sounds like, and the four things you have to write down before anything can give it.
Read →“How much for a half sleeve?” — pricing a tattoo on a call that cannot price it
The most common call a tattoo or permanent makeup studio takes is a price question with no correct answer. What the phone can safely say, what it must never say, and the six-line brief it should collect instead.
Read →A job without an address is not a job
Trades lose more work to the phone than any other appointment business, and it is rarely the booking that fails. It is the four things nobody collected — and the five calls where a safety line comes first.
Read →AI receptionist vs a human answering service: what the difference actually buys
A human answering service starts around $300 a month for thirty calls. The AI ones start at nothing. Here is what each of those actually gets an appointment business — with the prices sourced, and ours footnoted.
Read →How to choose an AI receptionist: the questions that actually separate them
Every AI receptionist sounds good in a demo. Eleven questions that tell them apart — with our own honest answers, including the three where we come off worse.
Read →What an AI receptionist should refuse to do
The dangerous failure is not a robotic voice. It is an agent that is confident, fluent and wrong — and the fix is a list of things it must never say.
Read →Don’t see your industry? We build custom versions of Harkbell for other kinds of business. Talk to us about a custom build