Phone menus were designed for companies with hundreds of agents and a routing problem. A small business with five employees copies the structure, and ends up with a menu that solves the company’s problem instead of the caller’s.
Admissions phone lines don’t get busy gradually. They spike in the last few days before a deadline, and the calls that arrive then are not the calls of a normal week.
In healthcare procurement, “will you sign a BAA?” gets asked first and is often treated as the finish line. It’s the starting line.
Most owners shopping for an AI receptionist ask what it can do. The better question is what it must never do, because that short list matters more than any feature.
A parent calling to check on their child’s application sounds like the easiest kind of call an admissions office gets. It’s actually one of the hardest to handle correctly, and most phone systems — human or automated — get it wrong in one direction or the other.