What an AI receptionist for an opticians actually does

What does it actually answer?

At Winstanley & Son the voice receptionist has answered the practice line since 23 August 2026. In its first nine days it took 91 calls, at a peak of around 25 a day, with 96% positive sentiment recorded across those calls. Before your practice management system enters this conversation: nothing here reads or writes a clinical record. The receptionist works from the diary, the order board and a set of practice facts, not from a patient's notes.

Front door, filter, and safety net: the three jobs in one line

It is worth thinking of the phone line as doing three jobs at once. First, a front door: it picks up every call, including the ones that would otherwise ring out on a Sunday evening or during a busy fitting. Second, a filter: routine questions get answered on the spot so a member of staff never has to repeat the same six answers a hundred times. Third, a safety net underneath both of those: anything it isn't sure about, or anything clinical, gets taken as a message rather than guessed at, and every call becomes a summary card and a task the team can see and follow up.

What it refuses to do, on purpose

The boundaries are deliberate, not a gap waiting to be closed. It does not take bookings over the phone. It gives no prices beyond the exam fee. Asked for opening hours it doesn't have on file, such as a Saturday, it says so rather than guessing. It never implies it is a person. And when asked whether a patient's glasses have come in, it answers truthfully from the order board rather than assuming yes. A separate name-based order lookup exists behind the scenes and has been proven correct on every test run so far, though in practice patients rarely have an order number to hand, so most calls about a collection are still taken as a message for now.

Every call opens with a short disclosure, in the practice's own approved wording: callers are told the call may be recorded for training and monitoring, and that they can ask for a call-back instead if they'd rather not be recorded.

What happens after the call ends

Every call produces a card in the staff Slack channel first, who called, what they wanted, whether a callback is needed, before anything else happens. A trackable task is created from that card, named for the call's outcome, so a follow-up can't quietly slip. The card is posted before the task is created deliberately, so that if the task step ever fails, the team still has the summary in front of them and nothing is lost. Since this pipeline went live on 27 August 2026, it has been running on real calls.

The other half: the reception agent behind the counter

The voice line is the patient-facing front door. A second, separate agent runs entirely inside the staff Slack channel and is never patient-facing at all: it takes a dictated sentence such as "task for a named member of staff, call the lab about Burns's lenses, priority B" and writes it down, assigned, prioritised, and visible to the whole team, in seconds. It answers "what's outstanding?" with a real, computed list, not a guess, and reads back a dictated order in full before creating anything. The two agents share the Crewley name because patients experience them as one assistant, but only the phone line and the patient texting agent ever reach a patient; the counter-facing one never does. See the full picture of every agent Crewley runs, the appointment booking page for how patient texts and bookings work, and the lab order tracking page for what the reception agent does with orders.

Questions practice owners ask