AI Receptionist Setup India: 7 Things to Send

Seven things, and you can gather all of them from what already exists in your business. Nothing on this list requires software you do not own.

One: your service list with prices. Every service or product a caller might ask about, with the number you would say out loud on the phone. Ranges are fine. "Price after assessment" is fine, as long as you say so explicitly.

Two: your real FAQs. The fifteen to twenty questions your staff answer every single day, each with the answer you would actually give — not a polished website version.

Three: your calling hours, and the after-hours rule. When you are open, when you are shut, weekly off, and what the agent should do at 11pm: book, take details, or say come back tomorrow.

Four: a decision about the phone number. Either the agent answers on a new number, or your existing number forwards to it — and whether forwarding is available at all depends on what your own operator supports on that connection, so confirm it rather than assume it. This is a decision, not a document, and it is the one that usually holds a launch up.

Five: your booking rules. Slot length, how many can run at once, buffer between appointments, who is qualified to do what, and how far ahead you take bookings. Calendar access is optional; the rules are not.

Six: one escalation contact. A name and a mobile number for the person who takes the handover, plus the list of topics that must always reach a human.

Seven: where your enquiries arrive. Ad platform leads, website form, WhatsApp, Instagram DMs, walk-in register, or a phone that simply rings. This is what decides whether you need an inbound agent, a callback agent, or both.

What you do not need to send: a CRM, an IT person, a call script, a recording studio, or a customer list you bought from anyone. If a vendor asks for none of the seven, you are almost certainly buying a self-serve dashboard where you will type all of it in yourself. That is a legitimate product and some businesses prefer it — it is simply a different purchase from having the agent built for you.

Each row below is the mechanism, not a prediction. These are the failure modes that follow logically from a missing input, and you can check every one of them against a demo call before you pay anything.

The pattern across the table is that a missing input never produces a silent failure. It produces a visible one, in front of your customer, on a call you are paying for. That is why the handover is worth an hour of your attention rather than being treated as paperwork.

The service list is the item people over-prepare and under-deliver. What a vendor needs is what you would say on the phone, not a formatted brochure. If a root canal is ₹6,000 to ₹9,000 depending on the tooth, send exactly that sentence. If the price genuinely depends on seeing the customer, the correct entry is "price after assessment, book the consultation" — an agent that says that clearly is doing its job, and an agent that guesses a number is doing damage you will argue about at your counter. Send the exceptions too: the senior citizen rate, the package that includes two sittings, the thing you stopped offering last month and still get asked about.

The FAQ set is where the value actually sits, and almost everyone sends the wrong version. Do not send your website FAQ page. Send what your staff repeat all day: where exactly is your building, is parking available, do you take UPI, is the doctor in on Saturday, do you do home visits, how long does it take, do I need to bring anything. A practical way to collect these in ten minutes is to scroll your own WhatsApp business chats and copy the replies you have typed most often. Those are your real FAQs, in your real words, and they are more useful than anything written for a website.

Calling hours need the boundary conditions, not just the range. "10am to 8pm" is incomplete. What is your weekly off, what happens on public holidays, what should the agent do with a call at 11pm on Saturday, and is there a lunch hour when nobody can take a transfer. The after-hours rule is a business decision only you can make: book the appointment against your live availability, or take details and promise a callback in the morning. Both are defensible. Leaving it unstated is not, because the agent will then be answering at an hour when there is nobody to transfer to and no instruction about it. The agents Dvaarik builds are configured to say plainly when they cannot help rather than improvise, so an unstated rule shows up as a flat refusal rather than a wrong booking.

The number is a decision, and it is what usually holds a launch up. You have two workable options. Take a new number that the agent answers, put it on your ads, your Google listing and your website, and keep your old number for people who already have it. Or keep your existing number as the one customers dial and forward it to the agent — either always, or only when your line is busy or unanswered after a set number of rings. The second option preserves the number printed on your signboard, which for an established shop is often the whole point. One honest caveat before you plan around it: whether forwarding is available, and whether the busy-or-unanswered variant of it is available, depends on your own operator and on whether the line is a mobile, a landline or a business connection. Confirm it with your operator before go-live rather than treating it as a given, because no vendor can promise it on your behalf.

On Dvaarik the number recharge is ₹2,000 per 30 days, auto-debited from your credit balance, and it covers the number plus one concurrent line. Concurrency is the part worth thinking about before go-live rather than after: one line means one call at a time, so if five people ring you inside the same two minutes on a Saturday evening, four of them hear the same engaged tone they hear today. An extra concurrent line is ₹1,500 a month. Tell your vendor your peak, not your average — your average is a number that has never once described your busiest hour.

Booking rules matter more than calendar access. Vendors will ask for a calendar connection, and it is genuinely useful because it lets the agent book against live availability instead of a guess. But the connection is worthless without the rules behind it: how long a slot is, how much buffer sits between appointments, how many appointments can run in parallel, which staff member or doctor handles which service, how far ahead you accept bookings, and what your cancellation and reschedule policy actually is. If you would rather not connect a calendar at all, that is a fair position — the agent can then capture the request and send it to you for confirmation, which is slower for the customer but keeps your calendar entirely in your hands. Say which you want. A vendor deciding that for you is a vendor guessing about your business.

One escalation contact, named, with a mobile number. Not a department, not a shared inbox, not "whoever is free". The agent needs a specific place to send a call or a summary when a human is required. Alongside the name, send the list of topics that must always reach a person: clinical or legal questions, billing disputes, complaints, anything involving a refund, and any caller who is clearly upset. Those are build requirements, not preferences, and a vendor who does not ask for them is not building for your risk.

Also decide what happens when the escalation contact does not pick up. That is a real scenario on a Sunday, and the honest answer is usually that the agent takes the details and sends the summary through rather than leaving the caller in a loop.

Where your enquiries arrive decides which agent you actually need. If your phone rings and nobody can reach it during a rush, an inbound receptionist is the fix. If your problem is leads sitting in an ad platform for hours before anyone calls them, an inbound receptionist does nothing at all for you — you need the callback path, where a new lead is called back within about sixty seconds of arriving. If most of your enquiries come through WhatsApp or Instagram DMs, the voice agent is not the first thing to build. So send the honest picture: where enquiries land today, roughly how many, and who handles them now.

One boundary that is not negotiable on our side. The outbound agents Dvaarik builds call only your own leads and enquiries — people who contacted you, filled your form, clicked your ad or gave you their number. Never bought lists, never scraped numbers, never a database someone sold you. If your plan for outbound is a purchased list, we are the wrong vendor and we will say so on WhatsApp rather than take the build. Calling hours are respected and the agent states which business is calling at the start of every outbound call. The regulatory side of this is covered in our note on whether AI calling is legal in India, and the callback mechanics are on speed to lead.

Send your proper nouns, written the way they are pronounced, plus the languages your callers actually use.

Proper nouns are where a generic agent gives itself away fastest. Your locality name, your building or landmark, your doctors' and stylists' names, your own brand name, your service names, and the two or three nearby areas customers say when giving directions. A caller who hears their own colony name mangled does not conclude that the software needs tuning. They conclude that they are talking to a call centre in another state, and the trust for everything said after that is lower.

On languages, send what arrives on your line rather than what you would like to serve. Dvaarik agents cover the 22 scheduled Indian languages plus English at ₹2 a minute on the Bharat Standard voice, so the constraint is not the vendor's language list — it is that nobody has told the vendor your callers open in Telugu and switch to English halfway, or that most of your enquiries arrive in Marathi-accented Hindi. Voice quality is a priced choice and here is the whole menu so you can see where the base sits: Bharat Standard ₹2/min, Studio HD ₹3/min, Global covering 99 languages ₹4–5/min, Ultra realtime ₹10/min, and call recording adds ₹0.10/min. The base advertised rate is always ₹2/min and it is the permanent price rather than a founding discount. All of those figures are quoted exclusive of GST.

Before go-live, read your proper nouns aloud on a test call in each language your customers use and listen to how they come back. Our live agent is open with no signup at app.dvaarik.com/dvaarik-ai, so you can run that test today, on any vendor's shortlist, before you have spent anything. More on the multilingual side is on the multilingual page.

Every competitor figure below was read on that vendor's own page on 21 Jul 2026 and is stored with the sentence it came from. None of it comes from a search snippet, an AI summary, or a rival's claims about a third party — each of those was tried during collection and each produced at least one false number. One caveat before you read the table: this ledger records published prices and terms, not intake forms. It tells you what going live costs and what each vendor says about the timeline, not what each vendor will ask you to hand over.

Three things to take from that table. A published setup fee of zero is not the same as a cheap start, because on several of these vendors the mandatory monthly plan is where the real entry cost sits. A one-time onboarding charge that converts into usable credits, as Edesy's does, is a different animal from one that does not. And rates in this market moved within weeks during collection, so check the vendor's own page before you sign anything. The maintained board is at the India AI voice agent pricing index.

Take a business getting 300 calls a month averaging about three minutes each. Billing is whole minutes, telecom standard, so a 3-minute-and-10-second call bills as four — call it roughly 1,050 billed minutes.

The arithmetic most pages will not print for you: at 1,050 billed minutes, months 1 to 3 work out to about ₹8.67 per minute all-in, and month 4 onward to about ₹3.90 per minute all-in, both before GST. Both are well above ₹2 because the ₹2,000 number recharge is fixed and the Care Plan is real money leaving your balance. We would rather you read that here than find it on your statement. Two things move it in your favour over time: the Care Plan is the trade for a ₹40,000 build we did not charge you for, and the fixed ₹2,000 spreads thinner as your call volume rises.

Starting requires a minimum first credit load of ₹10,000, billed at ₹11,800 because 18% GST applies at the point of loading credits — all our prices are quoted exclusive of GST. At the volume above, month one debits ₹9,100 of that ₹10,000, so plan on a top-up inside the first month rather than being surprised by one. Later top-ups start at ₹500, credits never expire, and at a zero balance everything pauses gracefully rather than running up a bill. WhatsApp conversation charges are billed by Meta directly to your own account with zero markup from us.

Now the part that connects the handover back to the bill. Every question the agent was never given an answer to ends as one of two things: a callback you make personally, or a confident wrong answer given to your customer. We are not going to put a percentage on how often that happens, because we have not measured your business and neither has anyone else. The direction is not in doubt, though, and it is checkable on your own first week of transcripts: an incomplete handover converts paid, answered calls back into your own unpaid phone time. The full breakdown of the offer is on the pricing page, and the build sequence is on how it works.

There are honest answers here that do not end in a build.

If your prices genuinely change per customer on every call, you are not ready. A business where nearly every conversation is a negotiation or an exception to your own list will see the agent hand most calls over anyway, which means you have paid for a routing step. Fix the price list first, or accept that a person should be answering.

If the phone call is the product, keep the human. A lawyer taking an initial brief, a therapist, a designer scoping a project — where the first conversation is the consultation, an agent answering it is a downgrade your customers will notice. That is not a limitation we are apologising for. It is the correct recommendation.

If you already answer nearly every call within a couple of rings, wait. No engaged tones, no voicemail after hours, nothing leaking — then the seven-item handover is effort spent on a problem you do not have. Count the calls you missed last month and multiply by your average order value with the missed-call loss calculator. If the loss does not comfortably exceed the ₹4,100 month above, we would rather tell you that on WhatsApp than sell you a founding slot you do not need yet.

If you want to configure it yourself rather than have it built, other vendors serve you better. Trikon publishes a flat ₹5/min with no monthly subscription and no setup fees, with telephony and DID numbers billed separately by your own carrier, which is a clean self-serve structure. HuskyVoice publishes an entry plan at ₹1,999/month including 100 voice credits at 2 credits per minute, with no setup fee and cancellation at any time, and their own page says setup takes under ten minutes. Dvaarik is not a login you configure — you describe the problem, we build the agent around your workflow, and it goes live in days. That is a different product and it is worse for someone who wanted the dashboard.

If you do have the seven things, send them and get a plan and a price. Tell us your problem on WhatsApp at +91 93923 98750 — roughly how many calls you get, which languages arrive, and what happens today when nobody can pick up. You will get an honest answer, including the answer that the case is not there yet.