Reception — the inbox, watched
The role that reads the inbox so you can stop refreshing it. It answers what is already written down, routes what is not, and puts calls in the calendar you already use.
It is not a chatbot on your website. It works the mailbox you already have, in your own tone, and everything it sends is a message you could have written.
Monday to Friday,
in specifics rather than verbs.
Invented and generic on purpose — there are no clients yet, so nothing below describes a real business. What it does describe accurately is what the role would do and where it would stop.
Three enquiries arrived overnight. Two ask about opening hours and price for a service on your list; both are answered before you are awake, in the language they were written in.
The third asks for something you do not offer. It is routed to you with a one-line summary at the top and no reply sent.
A supplier chases an order. Routed, not answered — it involves money, and money is yours.
Somebody asks for a call. Two slots are offered from the real calendar, and the one they pick appears in it.
A message arrives that is really a complaint. It is flagged, not answered, and it goes to the top of your pile with the reason it stopped.
Somebody asks a question you have never written down. It comes to you, and your answer becomes part of the brief, so the same question is answered next time.
What you actually do,
and how long each part takes.
"Easy onboarding" is not a claim anybody believes. This is the list, with a duration on every line, and the longest line is the fortnight where it does nothing.
Give it a mailbox — either your existing one or a forward, whichever you prefer.
Send your price list and your opening hours in whatever form they exist.
Two weeks of watching. It answers nothing and writes down what it would have said, next to what you said.
Read the write-up. Mark the answers you are happy for it to send on its own.
It starts answering only those. Everything else keeps arriving as a draft.
Three ways this role fails,
and what happens then.
It will be wrong. The design assumption is not that it will not be — it is that when it is, the item stops, says so and waits, and that you find out from the system rather than from a customer.
It answers a question it should have routed.
You see it in the sent folder, because it works your mailbox rather than a black box. Say so in a sentence and that class of question is routed from then on.
It misreads a message in dialect or in bad German.
It stops rather than guessing. An unclear message is routed with the reason attached, which is the same thing a careful receptionist does.
Someone asks for a price that is not on the list.
It never invents one. That is the role's single refusal and no configuration turns it off.
It never quotes a figure it had to guess. If the price is not written down, the question comes to you.
What this role does not touch.
A role that claims to take everything is a role nobody with a real business believes. Naming what stays with you is what makes the rest of the page worth reading.
Three questions
this one gets and the others do not.
Will people know it is not me?
Yes. Every message it sends says a system wrote it and names who to reach for a person. That is not a setting. A shop that hides this gets one round of goodwill and then loses considerably more than it saved.
What about spam?
Filtered before the role sees it, using the same filtering your mailbox already does. The role does not reply to anything it cannot identify as a real enquiry.
Can it work in German and English?
It answers in the language the message was written in, from whatever you have written down in that language. If your price list only exists in German, English questions get routed to you rather than machine-translated.
Turns an enquiry into a priced offer, ready to send.
Issues them, chases the quiet ones, matches the payments.
Reads what arrives as a PDF and files it where it belongs.
Bookings, reminders, cancellations, and who did not turn up.
One message a week: what came in, what went out, what needs you.