An AI phone assistant knows nothing about your institution until you enter it. AiMED Voice answers callers’ questions from the knowledge base you fill in in the portal, and when it has no answer, it says so. That makes the knowledge base the most important part of the preparation: it decides what the caller hears.
This is a checklist you can go through with the person who answers the phone most often today.
Start with the questions that repeat
The same questions about prices, preparation and working hours come up day after day. The person at the front desk knows them by heart. Ask them to write down what callers ask, in the callers’ own words. That list is the draft of your knowledge base.
1. Working hours
- The institution’s working hours by day.
- Holidays, annual closures and days when the institution is closed.
- What a caller should know when calling outside working hours. The assistant answers at any hour, but the institution is closed then, and that should be said clearly.
The working hours of individual doctors and their absences go into the portal calendar, because the assistant uses them when it looks for an open slot.
2. Address and access
- The exact address, entrance and floor.
- How to get there: a landmark patients recognize, public transport, parking.
- Access for people with reduced mobility: an elevator or a ramp.
- Where the patient checks in on arrival.
Write the way you would explain it on the phone. The assistant says the answer out loud, so short, clear sentences are easier to follow than long descriptions.
3. Services
For each service, enter:
- The name, the way patients say it, not only the technical term.
- The duration. The assistant uses it when it looks for an open slot.
- The price.
- The preparation instructions. For example, whether the patient should come fasting and what to bring.
The preparation instructions deserve special care. The assistant can tell them to the caller when it confirms the appointment, so write them as one or two sentences that are easy to say and easy to remember.
4. Organizational questions
Everything else callers ask regularly that has nothing to do with a medical decision:
- how to pay,
- what to bring to the exam,
- whether a referral is needed,
- how and when reports are collected.
If your institution has no single answer to one of these questions, agree on it internally first. The assistant answers from what you enter, so the answer should be one the institution stands behind.
5. What the assistant says when a question is not covered
No knowledge base covers everything. When the assistant has no answer, it says it doesn’t have that information and offers to have the institution call the caller back. In the call log you see the reason for the call and a summary, so you know whom you are calling and why.
Agree in advance who in the institution reviews those calls and who calls back. The offer of a call back is worth as much as that agreement is clear.
There are two things you should not try to solve with the knowledge base.
- Medical questions. The assistant does not interpret symptoms or advise on therapy. Enter organizational information in the knowledge base, not medical advice.
- Emergencies. When a caller says they have urgent symptoms, the assistant tells them to call emergency services on 112.
How to write the answers
- One question, one answer.
- Write full sentences, as if you were speaking to the caller.
- Avoid abbreviations and internal names.
- Enter what is true today. When the assistant has no answer, it says so and offers a call back. An outdated answer it says as if it were true.
The knowledge base is not finished on day one
From the first call, every conversation is in the portal: who called, why, and what was agreed. Staff read the summaries and add to the knowledge base when the assistant didn’t know something. Once you add to the knowledge base, the assistant knows the answer from the next call.
In practice this is a short habit: regularly review the calls where the assistant had no answer and decide which of them belong in the knowledge base.
A short checklist to finish
- Write down the questions callers really ask.
- Enter the working hours, the address and how to get there.
- Enter the services with their duration, price and preparation instructions.
- Enter the doctors with their working hours and absences.
- Agree who calls back when the assistant has no answer.
- Keep adding to the knowledge base from the call log.
To see what an answer from the knowledge base looks like in one call, from the question to the record in the portal, watch the animated presentation on the How it works page. If you would like to go through this checklist with your own institution as the example, request a demo.
