No-show
- A booked appointment the customer neither attends nor cancels, so the slot is lost with no chance to refill it. Distinct from a late cancellation, which at least leaves time to offer the slot to someone else. No-shows are the single largest recoverable loss in an appointment-led business. Read more →
No-show risk score
- An estimate of how likely a specific upcoming appointment is to be missed, from signals like whether the customer confirmed, their past attendance, and the time of day. Its purpose is to decide where to spend attention: a high-risk slot gets a reminder, a very-high-risk one gets offered to the waitlist. Read more →
Recall
- Contacting a past customer when a service is due again — a six-month dental check, a colour appointment six weeks on, an annual physical. It is distinct from promotion: the customer has already bought, and the message is a reminder of an interval rather than an offer. In most appointment businesses it is the largest unworked revenue line. Read more →
Handover
- Passing a live conversation from the AI to a member of staff, with the thread history intact so the customer does not repeat themselves. It happens either because the customer asks for a person or because the question falls outside what the assistant was given. A system without clean handover eventually traps someone in a loop.
Escalation
- Interrupting the normal flow because something needs a human now — a described emergency, an angry customer, a complaint. It differs from handover in urgency: handover moves a conversation along, escalation stops it and alerts someone. Escalation triggers are an operational convenience, not a safety system.
Go-live
- The moment the assistant starts answering real customers on your number. It is a specific, dated event rather than a gradual rollout, because it is what the refund window is measured from. It follows setup and manual activation, so it does not happen the moment you finish uploading documents. Read more →
Knowledge base
- The set of documents an assistant is allowed to answer from: price list, service menu, opening hours, staff roster, booking rules, common questions. It is the boundary of what the system knows. A question outside it should produce a handover, not an invented answer. Read more →
Booking buffer
- Padding deliberately left between appointments for cleaning, turnaround or overrun. It is a booking rule rather than a service duration, so a system that only knows how long a service takes will overbook a day that looked free.
Service duration
- How long a specific service actually occupies a chair, room or clinician. It is why bookings have to be service-aware: a thirty-minute cut and a two-hour colour cannot be offered the same slot, and a system that treats every appointment as one length will promise times it cannot keep.
Waitlist
- Customers who wanted a slot that was already taken and agreed to be contacted if it frees up. It converts a cancellation from a loss into a filled appointment, and it is the difference between "we're fully booked" closing a conversation and opening one.
Owner dashboard
- The view where a business owner reads every conversation as it happens, plus a daily summary of bookings, cancellations, what customers asked about and anything needing attention. Its purpose is supervision: an assistant nobody can audit is an assistant nobody should trust.
Staff takeover
- A member of staff stepping into a conversation the assistant is handling and taking control of it, at any point and without ending the thread. Distinct from handover in who initiates: handover is the assistant passing the conversation up, takeover is a person reaching in.