Every vendor in this category now says "AI-native", "omnichannel" and "enterprise-grade". Those words no longer separate anyone. These are the questions that do — written to be used against any vendor, including us.
Most evaluations spend their time on feature checklists, where everyone scores well. These five are where products genuinely differ.
Ask to watch it. The customer should not repeat themselves, and the agent should have the context before they speak. If the bot and the contact center are separate products stitched together, the handoff is an integration — and integrations lose things. Ask specifically: does the agent see why it escalated, and what was already collected?
A surprisingly good proxy for whether the AI is really inside the platform. If the AI is a bolted-on service, it is invisible to supervision and to reporting, which means you cannot manage the thing now handling most of your customers.
There is only one acceptable answer: the call goes to a person. Ask what happens to a caller mid-sentence when the provider has an incident. If the answer involves an error message or a hold, that is a customer you lost while paying for the privilege.
Get the actual arithmetic, not a tier name. Per-seat, per-resolution and per-minute pricing diverge wildly as you grow, and the model that looks cheapest in the demo is often the one that punishes success. Ask what a part-time weekend hire costs you.
Ask which numbers on their website were measured on a running system and which are targets or modelling. Ask what they have not done. A vendor that cannot name a gap either has not looked or is not telling you.
A trial tells you more than a demo, because a demo is a rehearsed path. Do these five things before you form an opinion.
Once behaving well, once interrupting mid-sentence and changing the subject. Real callers do the second one constantly, and it is where scripted bots fall apart.
A price, an opening time, a policy. If it invents an answer, that is what it will do to your customers. If it escalates, check whether the agent gets the context.
Time how long that takes and how many steps it costs. A system that traps people is worse than no system.
Then look at the reporting. An abandoned call should be recorded as abandoned, not quietly lost or attributed to an agent who never spoke.
Whatever you just did should be visible and explicable in the usage figures. If you cannot reconcile it on a trial, you will not reconcile it at scale.
Not at the end. How a vendor answers it — and how fast — tells you what support will feel like after you sign.
Ask every vendor on your shortlist. Our own answers are in the third column — check them against the pages they link to.
| Question | Why it matters | Our answer |
|---|---|---|
| Is the AI included, or an add-on? | Add-on pricing means the AI's value accrues to the vendor, not you. | Included on every plan, including the free one. You pay per AI minute at a published rate. |
| Which features are gated by tier? | Supervision, quality and workforce tools are commonly held back — and they are what make a team improve. | None. Plans differ by seat cap and included usage only. |
| What does adding one more person cost? | The answer shapes how willing you will be to staff properly. | Nothing, up to your plan's cap. |
| Can we bring our own carrier? | Otherwise your numbers and your call rates are locked to the vendor. | Yes — connect your SIP trunks and keep your rates. |
| Who are your sub-processors? | Procurement will ask eventually. Better to know before you are committed. | All six are listed publicly. |
| Do you have SOC 2? | If you need it to sign, timing is the whole conversation. | No, and we say so rather than implying otherwise. |
| What is your uptime commitment? | A number without a remedy is marketing; a remedy without evidence is worse. | We publish no SLA, because we cannot yet stand behind one. The drills we ran are published instead. |
| Does a live call survive a server failure? | Almost no vendor volunteers this, and almost none survive it. | No. The call drops and the caller redials; agents and queues recover automatically. |
| How do we get our data out? | Ask before you are dependent, not after. | Contacts export to CSV; the privacy tools export everything held against a phone number. No contract to leave. |
None of these are proof of a bad product. All of them are worth a follow-up question.
Usually means the price varies by what they think you will pay. You can ask for the rate card anyway — and note how they respond.
If you are not allowed to speak over it or take the wheel, you are watching a video, not a product.
"Resolves 70% of enquiries" means nothing without knowing of what, measured how, and over what period.
Every platform has them. A vendor who names none is telling you about their candour, not their product.
Point a number at an AI agent and work down the list. If we fail one of them, we would rather you told us than quietly ruled us out.
Google or Microsoft · 30-day free trial · $15 credit · no card required