Abigel.ai Virtual Assistant in practice: setting up an SME reception in 10 minutes

One of the founding principles behind the Abigel.ai Virtual Assistant was that a small business should be able to set up its own phone reception without a developer. In this article we walk through what that looks like in practice, using a typical SME (say a repair shop or a medical practice) as the example. The product was built as part of our DIMOP Plusz grant project, and the details are at abigel.ai/virtual-assistant.

Sign-up and industry template

The first step is signing up: email address, password, company name. We do not ask for payment details up front; pricing is usage-based and per minute, so you only pay for the calls actually handled, and there is no monthly fee.

After sign-up the system asks for an industry template. A template is not just a greeting text but a complete conversation flow: what the assistant asks, what data it collects, when it books an appointment, when it promises a callback. For a dental practice, for example, the template knows that a complaint, an urgent case and an appointment request are the three typical reasons for calling; for a car repair shop it is the registration number, the model and a description of the problem. Once a template is selected, the assistant is already operational; the remaining steps are fine-tuning.

Customising the no-code flow

The template opens in a visual editor. Here you can rewrite the greeting, set the opening hours, the address, the services and the prices the assistant may talk about, and also what it must not discuss. For appointment booking you can set which days and time slots are bookable and how long a slot is; the assistant offers appointments accordingly and writes bookings into the calendar.

What matters most, in our experience:

• a short, concrete list of services, not a long marketing text;
• a clear rule for what the assistant should do when it cannot answer (our default: take the name and phone number and promise a callback);
• language settings: the assistant speaks more than 25 languages and detects the caller’s language automatically, but it is worth specifying which languages you expect calls in.

After ten or fifteen lines of configuration, with no developer involved, the flow is ready. You can try it out straight away in the editor from the browser, before wiring it to a real phone number.

Call forwarding with the 61 code

The assistant gets its own phone number attached to the account. There is no need to replace the existing company number: calls are forwarded conditionally. With most Hungarian operators, “if not answered” forwarding can be set from the phone with a GSM code:

*61*<assigned number>#

You dial this once from the company phone, and from then on every call that is not answered after a given ringing time goes through to the assistant. During office hours a colleague picks up if they can; when they are busy, or when someone calls in the evening or at the weekend, the assistant answers, 24 hours a day. Forwarding can be turned off at any time with the #61# code. For landlines or PBX numbers, forwarding is configured in the operator’s interface, but the principle is the same.

Test call, transcripts, export and the referral program

Before going live we always recommend a test call: dial the company number from your own mobile, do not answer it, and wait for the assistant to pick up. It is worth playing through the typical cases: an appointment request, opening hours, and a question it has no answer to.

After every call, the full transcript and a short summary appear in the interface: who called, why, what data they gave, whether a booking was made, whether a callback is needed. The summary is also sent by email, so whoever comes in the morning sees from a list what happened overnight. Calls can be filtered by status (handled, to call back, booking), and the important ones can be flagged.

The call list and the collected data can be exported in CSV format so they can be loaded into an existing spreadsheet, CRM or booking system. The export includes the time, the caller’s number, the language, the summary and the structured fields (name, requested service, booked appointment), plus the call duration for per-minute billing.

In the referral program every account has a referral link; if another business signs up through it, both parties get a credit on their per-minute balance. We deliberately kept this simple: no tiers, no conditions, just a link.

What the 10 minutes does not include

Setup really is short, but two things are worth watching afterwards. Read through the first week’s transcripts: they reveal which questions got poor answers, and each of those can be patched in the flow with a line or two. The other is maintaining opening hours and services: the assistant says what you configured, and outdated opening hours are worse than none. If those two are in order, the reception runs by itself from then on.