Deep dive · Reception

AI front desk for small business.

An AI front desk is one AI employee that covers the intake side of reception: it reads every inbound enquiry, drafts the answer from your own material, carries the details into a record, and journals the run. A person sends the reply. One AI employee costs $149 a month.

It runs on text today: a form or quiz posts to the lead endpoint and the enquiry is stored before anything else happens. Telephony, SMS and calendar connections are scoped per deployment. Below are three venue scenarios, the channel statuses behind them, and the numbers behind the price.

Scope a front desk See pricing

Unistaff · Front desk

Intake

RunsIntake · Draft · Qualify · Journal

ChannelsWeb form / Quiz

Batch≤5 enquiries per run

SendHuman

StatusDrafts waiting · 24/7

What the desk does on every enquiry

Reception work breaks into four moves, and the role runs all four in one pass. Each move is a step in code with a validator behind it, which is why the same enquiry handled on a Tuesday and on a Sunday comes back with the same shape.

Intake

A web form or quiz posts to the lead endpoint and the enquiry lands in Postgres before anything else runs. The body is capped at 10 KB, a hidden field absorbs bots, and a submission carrying no contact channel comes back with the reason.

Draft

The role writes the first reply from your brief, service list and house rules: two to four sentences, 100 to 500 characters, ready to send as written. Any price is marked pending your approval until you confirm it.

Qualify

Form answers travel with the enquiry as structured fields, so the reply answers what was actually asked. The full name, phone number and email address stay out of the prompt — the role works from an initial and the answers.

Journal

Every run is written with its inputs, its outcome and its error text. A run that failed stays visible as a run that failed, so the share of drafts sent unedited is a query rather than an impression.

The loop runs on a timer — every fifteen minutes in the reference deployment — and each pass picks up at most five enquiries that have no draft yet. A burst on a Friday night is worked through in batches, and the drafts are waiting before anyone opens the inbox on Saturday.

Three venues, three scopes

A front desk in a café and a front desk in a clinic run the same machinery on different material. Each scenario below is a model of a deployment shape — the enquiries a desk of that kind receives, what the role drafts, and the line where it stops.

Coffee shop

Modeled scope

The desk is a phone on the bar and an inbox nobody owns. Catering and hire enquiries arrive during the morning rush and get answered after close, if at all.

What hits the desk

Catering orders for 20 people and up
Private hire of the back room
Repeat questions: opening hours, oat milk, dog policy, wifi
Wholesale bean enquiries from small offices

What the role drafts

Repeat questions are answered from the service list in one pass. A catering enquiry comes back with the lead time you set, the headcount and dietary notes pulled off the form, and a price band marked pending your approval.

Where it stops

A specific date's availability, a complaint about an order, anything that needs the roaster or the owner's judgement.

What the owner keeps

The send button, the diary and the final number.

Salon or barber

Modeled scope

Bookings and quote questions arrive while every chair is full. The reply that decides the booking is the one that goes out first.

What hits the desk

Booking and reschedule requests
“How much for colour on hair this length?”
Product and gift card questions
Cancellations, often late in the evening

What the role drafts

The reply asks the three questions your stylists need before they can quote — length, current colour, last treatment — and repeats back what the client already gave. Price bands stay marked as pending until a stylist confirms.

Where it stops

The booking itself, refunds, and any quote that a stylist must judge from a photo.

What the owner keeps

The calendar, the price and the chair.

Clinic or practice

Modeled scope

One person covers phones, check-in and scheduling. Requests that arrive during a consultation wait for a gap that never comes.

What hits the desk

Appointment and reschedule requests
Preparation instructions before a visit
Coverage and paperwork questions
Requests that turn out to be clinical

What the role drafts

The logistics answer: what to bring, where to park, how long the visit runs, what the intake form needs. Every draft carries the passage of your material it came from, so the desk can check it in seconds.

Where it stops

Everything clinical, every cancellation, and anything touching results. Health-data obligations are scoped before launch rather than assumed.

What the owner keeps

The clinical judgement, the calendar and the send.

Channels, with their real status

A front desk is only as good as the channel it listens on, so here is where each one stands today. A row moves up when its code does.

Channel	Status	What that means
Web form and quiz intake	Live	Enquiry stored on submit, first reply drafted on the next run.
Lead notification by email	Live	One attempt with a five-second timeout; the outcome is logged either way.
Meta Ads import	On request	Built and tested; turns on once you connect your own ad account.
Calendar booking	Scoped per deployment	No calendar connector ships today, so live availability is scoped first.
SMS reminders	Scoped per deployment	No SMS provider ships today; the provider is chosen with you.
Phone answering (voice)	Custom scope · Enterprise	Telephony, recording consent and the handover rule come before any build.
Call tracking	Planned	Calls stay outside attribution until the source exists, rather than being estimated.

Full connector list and its evidence: /integrations

What it costs against a front-desk hire

The ROI calculator on this site ships a Healthcare front desk role, and the calculator’s own defaults answer the cost question without any new arithmetic: one role, 40 hours a week, $35 an hour, 70% of those hours handed across.

Read it as a comparison of hours. The 30% left over is the part of the desk that carries judgement — the upset customer, the exception, the decision — and it still needs a person. What changes is that the person spends the shift on those hours instead of retyping opening times.

Run your own numbers Compare plans

Baseline front-desk hours40 per week

Hourly rate$35

Share of hours handed to the AI70%

Hours handed off28 per week

Cost of those hours, per month$4,243

AI employee, per month$149 — Starter

Source: Healthcare front desk role at the ROI calculator defaults

The first week

Day 1

Write the ten questions your desk answers every week, with the answer you already give. That list is the first version of the material the role reads on every run.

Day 2

Set the house rules: what may be stated as fact, what must be marked pending your approval, and the point where the role stops and hands over.

Days 3–5

Point the form at the lead endpoint and run in shadow. Read every draft before it goes and correct the material where the draft was wrong.

Day 6

Count the drafts that went out unedited. That share decides how much of the desk moves across next, and it comes out of the journal rather than out of a feeling.

Frequently asked questions

One AI employee that covers the intake side of reception: it reads every inbound enquiry, drafts the reply from your own brief and service list, carries the form answers into a structured record, and journals the run. A person reads the draft and sends it.

On Unistaff, no. Text intake runs today — a web form or quiz posts to the lead endpoint and the first reply is drafted on the next run. A voice front desk is custom scope on an Enterprise plan and begins with telephony, recording consent and the handover rule. Call tracking sits on the integrations roadmap.

One AI employee is $149 a month on Starter, with a 14-day pilot and cancellation at any time. Up to five AI employees with custom briefs and priority support is $599 a month on Scale. Enterprise is custom-priced and carries custom roles, workflows and SLA-backed support.

The machinery is identical; the material differs. A coffee shop briefs the role on catering lead times and hire rules, a clinic on visit preparation and what must go to a person. Both read that material on every run, so a Tuesday answer matches a Sunday answer.

It prepares the booking with the details the booking needs, and a person puts it in the calendar. Unistaff ships no calendar connector today, so a deployment that depends on live availability starts by scoping that connection.

The role works from an initial and the answers on the form. The full name, phone number and email address never enter the prompt, and the contact record stays in the database the reply is sent from.

A chatbot answers inside its window and the conversation ends there. The front-desk role stores the enquiry, drafts a reply your team sends, and journals the run with its outcome, so the week's volume and quality are countable.