Should You Consider an AI Phone Assistant For Your Small Business?
At
Salon Le Volume,
we love building relationships with new and existing guests in our
vibrant Frisco, TX community. We always strive to answer the phones and speak directly with guests who call during our
open hours, but during off hours, we were sending all calls to voicemail and often getting missed calls with no corresponding voicemail.
There is a ton of information on our website about hair care services, insights, methods, and products, and giving people access to hear some of that information verbally during our off-hours could help us achieve an even higher level of customer service and experience.
We all see that everyone is hyping AI and its potential impact on small businesses in all types of ways, but we knew that we would have to experiment with it in order to tell if it was really good enough to be trusted to handle our after-hours calls and add some value over a simple voicemail system.
Contents and Topics - Jump To Topics of Interest
- The AI Chat Agents We Tried: My AI Front Desk, Hey Rosie, Curious Thing, IsOn24, and Synthflow AI
- Our Journey: The AI Chat Agent Evaluation Process
- "Lucy" by Curious Thing: Why We Went Another Direction
- My AI Front Desk: Our Final Selection
- Other AI Phone Assistant Options: Our Impressions
- Hey Rosie
- Dialzara
- IsOn24
- Synthflow
- Is It Too Good to Be True? Industry Recommendations and Insights from a Business Owner's Perspective
- Q&A Session on the AI Phone Assistant Setup Process with Salon Le Volume Owner and Creative Director, Kristina Bynum
The AI Chat Agents We Tried: My AI Front Desk, Hey Rosie, Curious Thing, IsOn24, and Synthflow AI
At first, we were thinking we would try to get an AI chat client that integrated with our Vagaro hair appointment booking system, so our Google search was centered on finding chat agents that worked with Vagaro. We were searching for things like "AI phone assistant for hair salon that integrates with Vagaro." Unsurprisingly, MANY chat agent providers seem to overstate their ability to integrate with third-party providers like Vagaro. They will state that they work with Vagaro when all they will really do is send a text with a link to your Vagaro booking page (once it's a link, it could be a link to anywhere, so there is no specific "integration" with Vagaro).
Even still, this search did lead us to several good candidates. We looked at
My AI Front Desk,
Hey Rosie,
Curious Thing,
IsOn24, and
Synthflow AI We started zeroing in on My AI Front Desk, even though it's not currently showing up on the easy-to-find "top 10 lists" (such as
this very well-put-together one that we did enjoy reading). My AI Front Desk has a simple workflow, and we bounced to it after we tried a trial of Curious Thing's "Lucy" chat agent when we couldn't figure out how to get Lucy to ask permission before sending a link to a caller during an interaction (maybe it can do it, but we couldn't figure out how and permission is definitely needed).
Our Journey: The AI Chat Agent Evaluation Process
"Lucy" by Curious Thing: Why We Went Another Direction
Our initial searching and weighing of factors led us to try out "Lucy" by Curious Thing. If you want to check them out on the Curious Thing YouTube channel, they have a good walkthrough of how to do the setup using their online interface, as well as some cool demos of the results, so you can see what to expect.
We got our very own number assigned right away and started doing the setup. They were also on point with setting up a demo/onboarding call to talk through the features and setup, which was very helpful. We did the initial setup and then started calling our demo number and trying it out. We were mostly impressed, but we did notice that it was a little laggy (ANY lagginess is almost unacceptable these days with how good the products have gotten overall), and we also noticed it was mispronouncing the name of our business right up front in the greeting (not cool!).
I'm sure they have settings to change the pronunciation, but it wasn't immediately obvious how to do it. We were brand-new to the process overall, so we were probably a little impatient. What made us move on was a very simple flaw/choice: They did not include an option (at the time of our evaluation) to prompt the caller for permission to send a text message. It just went ahead and texted out a link to book an appointment if someone mentioned appointments or bookings without asking them for permission first. For us this was a no-go, so we moved on...
My AI Front Desk: Our Final Selection
My AI Front Desk (which is what we settled on in the end) was actually the second AI phone assistant we evaluated. Since we were focused a bit on the texting workflow, we were immediately impressed with the straightforward setup interface that showed the texting process and had a clear yes/no option for asking permission before sending a message (we toggled this to yes!).
As we worked through the rest of the setup, we found that all the "little" things we wanted to do had simple and easy solutions. For example, what should you do when a caller says no to receiving a text message with a link to our booking system? A clear answer for us would be to politely ask for some more details and then state that the information will be sent over to a guest services coordinator (which it is doing now!).
We also found a simple/easy location to adjust the pronunciation of certain words and names - for example, the name of our salon. We prefer the French pronunciation of the word "volume," which sounds a bit like "vuhloom," and the popular balayage service also had an unfortunate sounding pronunciation until we adjusted it.
The voice itself needed to sound professional and friendly but also have slight imperfections to make it sound real and relatable so that someone will briefly engage and start the process of sharing information about the service or appointment they are interested in booking. We found the PERFECT one for us, and this wasn't easy - we listened to more than a hundred AI-generated voices across all the platforms mentioned above. Our current greeting is below if you want to give it a listen.
Other AI Phone Assistant Options: Our Impressions
We were pretty happy with what we saw and experienced with My AI Front Desk, but we also knew that there were a lot of options out there. We didn't want to leave any potential performance or impact on the table, so we circled back to some of the other top ranking services.

Hey Rosie
Hey Rosie seems to rank very highly and come up in a lot of the online searches for this type of thing. From our perspective, it seemed like their setup options were only offered at a very high level (see insights and recommendations below). After doing the detailed setup with My Front Desk AI, the thought of just putting our website link in and then "trusting" that Rosie would just know exactly what to do didn't sound good to us.
Dialzara
We looked briefly at Dialzara, which is sometimes ranked at the top of the "best-of" lists for AI phone assistants. The setup looked way too basic (just a single text/input block where you use keywords to signify things like texting workflow or form/information intake workflow. The tool may work very well, but I would need to pay for the onboarding service, since it wasn't super clear how to make it behave as we wanted.

IsOn24
There are two services that we are still very interested in and will be looking at further as we continue to evolve our approach. The service called IsOn24 looks very attractive and talks about something called "latency booster" (attractive because we've already seen a little bit of lag in response time on our current service).
IsOn24 also offers a lot in the way of texting responses, so potential clients can interact with the AI assistant via text message, asking questions and getting responses. We did a trial with them, and it wasn't immediately obvious how to quickly replicate our existing implementation that we spent around 2-3 hours customizing and inputting, so we decided to put this one on the back burner/maybe list to continue evaluating as we have time.

Synthflow
We were also very impressed with the potential of a product called Synthflow, because of all the products we looked at, it seems like their calendar features would actually allow clients to book specific appointments with specific stylists. It could also do a one-way sync with our existing calendars to mostly avoid double bookings. There is a really detailed YouTube video with a walk-through of how to set this up using Synthflow as a provider, and it shows what looks like pretty extensive calendar options that may also suit salons with different providers/stylists having separate calendars.
For now, we have decided not to try to fully book appointments using the AI phone assistant. In our estimation, it will require too much time for the client to want to interact with an AI bot to patiently book the appointment, and most providers out there only give lip service to having a calendar option (at least for the complexity of a hair salon with multiple services and multiple different providers/stylists).
Additionally, since Vagaro (our appointment booking system) doesn't have a very open API, it requires a custom implementation to get anything beyond just a one-way (outgoing) sync, which would result in manual steps to get the appointments booked into the Vagaro system to ensure no future conflicts or double bookings.

Is It Too Good to Be True? Industry Recommendations and Insights from a Business Owner's Perspective
One insight we had from what we've observed is that many of the current crop of AI phone assistant products are letting their "business vision" get in the way of what the product really needs in order to function well.
The primary example is that it is clear that they desire to have a VERY simple setup process. They want you to be able to just include a link to your existing business website with product and service descriptions, and then they figure out everything from there with nothing else needed from you. Of course, as a busy business owner, this sounds attractive - the AI is so smart that it will just scan my website and figure out everything that it needs to do and then my implementation is done!
In the end, we found the old adage to still hold that if it seems too good to be true, it is. Some products, such as My AI Front Desk, have an interface with a medium level of complexity, giving you just enough control and influence over the setup to have it behave like you want it to.
Q&A Session on the AI Phone Assistant Setup Process with Salon Le Volume Owner and Creative Director, Kristina Bynum
We all hear and see that AI assistants are "all the rage" in various forms. Recently at Salon Le Volume, you decided to evaluate a phone assistant that was AI-based for after-hours calls. Can you explain a little bit more behind your motivation for starting to look into that?
The main reason we wanted to incorporate it sprung from our desire to give a higher level of customer service whenever we are not able to get to the phones. We have a lot of information on our website about our services, pricing, and hair care tips, but some people want to hear that information verbally. When it is off hours or we're away from the phone, we weren't able to provide the information in that way. With an AI phone assistant that can "learn" all of our website content, it now becomes possible to serve this information up verbally if someone is interested.
As a small business salon owner, you are also very interested in making sure you get some "engagement" for leads that come your way. Prior to implementing this, we just had a simple "leave a message" voicemail system, and that just doesn't do a whole lot in the form of engagement. Even though this phone assistant is AI/computer-based, you can still get a little bit of back-and-forth interaction that establishes some preliminary rapport instead of just leaving it up to a one-sided voicemail.
We've all heard that if you're not using AI in your business then you're falling behind. True or not, it definitely gets you thinking, and this was an easy way to start incorporating some of the newer technology into our business to fill a gap in the off hours times when we don't have front desk coverage.
As a business owner, what were the most important features or factors that you considered in AI phone assistant products, and which service did you ultimately select?
We did the trials with several different products and some of them were really limited in the options they offered during setup/implementation. I ended up going with a platform that allowed very detailed and customized inputs.
For instance, one site would only allow a maximum of three frequently asked questions, and from answering phones at the salon, there are a lot more than three frequently asked questions! The platform we selected was My AI Front Desk, which allowed for as many Q&As as we could come up with, even on their "basic/entry" plan. For me, being able to control what specific information was fed into the AI with specific prompts and workflows helped me feel like it was going to be a good implementation. A lot of these different platforms would only link to your website, or you could link to a PDF or something like that.
I appreciated the ability to be able to discretely add descriptions of our services, pricing, directions to our place, and have a little bit more ability to customize all of that. Of course, after all that discrete entry, the AI engine still did a great job of using that information in a non-formulaic way to make it feel like a very natural conversation no matter what the person is asking (at least so far!).
How has the performance been during the first week of using the AI Phone Assistant to answer after-hours calls at the salon? What are you liking, what are you not liking, and how is it impacting the business?
It really has felt like a bit of a weight has been lifted as far as the capability to provide better customer service and engagement during off hours or times where we can't get to the phone. I love having the visual dashboard to see some information that was taken down during the call that assists with the starting place for our callback, and I also love knowing that clients are getting that engagement and potential to have the back-and-forth conversation instead of just a one-way voicemail.
We are still at the beginning stages of it, and I have noticed a few things that I'd like to tweak as I look at how certain interactions have gone. I've been able to go in and provide additional information or tweak the workflow and make improvements.
Voice recognition and phone automation techniques have been around for a long time, and they've never really worked very well in the past, but some people are saying that AI-based phone assistance is a game-changer. How much of that is marketing hype, and how much of it is real? How has it met or exceeded your expectations for this type of product?
I have been experimenting with ChatGPT and have really been amazed with its capabilities, so my expectations were pretty high just going into the process. The AI phone assistant that we set up through My AI Front Desk is meeting my high expectations so far. There is a clear improvement in the conversational style and feel compared to very rigid voice recognition systems of the past. I can already tell that it is far better than sending someone into the black hole of voicemail, but I also think that it still has plenty of room to grow.
A lot of the AI phone assistant products claim to have calendar integration and that they are able to book appointments for you and everything. They kind of promise the world in this sense, and you know that that may not totally be true. What did you find as you got into trying to set up calendar integration to enable booking of appointments at a hair salon using an AI phone assistant?
When we first started looking, we really wanted the AI phone assistant to be able to integrate with our Vagaro booking system and calendar, and we quickly found out that although many products claim to be able to book appointments, they are not actually integrated with Vagaro.
When we used the calendar workflow option on My AI Front Desk, we found a way to export all the calendars to our company calendar (Google admin-managed), but then they didn't have very good additional settings or adjustments to be able to show what times were actually available, and there was no customization for the "type" of service or appointment, so the performance there would be very limited.
During our search, we did find that Synthflow appears to sync the calendar with Vagaro (one way) and that they also appear to have extensive options for setting up different providers (stylists) and offering different types of services. In order to get this setup, it would have been approximately $400/mo (from what we could tell), and the demo call that I listened to just sounded like a lot of back-and-forth required with the customer booking the appointment. I believe that the system would get it right in the end, but I'm not sure that very many people would be patient enough to talk with an AI agent for the amount of time it would take to book an appointment.
That was our personal feeling, but it is something that we want to continue to look into and possibly continue to demo and keep tabs on to see how it progresses.
How much of a budget are you allocating for your salon's after-hours AI phone assistant, and do you think you're getting good value for that investment?
We are allocating about $90 a month toward the service, and so far, that feels like an absolute steal as far as value for the investment. The value is there because now I'm able to give some amount of additional customer service that I wouldn't otherwise be able to provide at times when we're not able to answer the phone and it would otherwise go straight to voicemail. Also, on the business side, my intuition from just one week of use is that it may be significantly better as far as capturing leads with new customers who call after hours. For any small business owner that is spending budget on marketing and outreach this is a huge priority. We're still early on in our usage of the product, so only time will tell if it really does make any difference on the bottom line.
