Set up your agency's own AI receptionist (and demo line)
Before you set up a single customer, set up a receptionist for your own agency. It costs $39/month, takes about 15 minutes in the wizard, and it's the highest-leverage thing on your to-do list — because it's your product education, your lead capture, and your demo line, all in one phone number.
1. Why your agency goes first
Never pitch software you haven't used. A prospect can smell it in one question — "what happens when someone calls after hours?" — and the reseller who has lived with the product answers in concrete detail while the one who hasn't stalls. Running your own receptionist for even a week gives you the stories that close: the call it caught at 9pm, the summary email that hit your inbox before you'd finished dinner.
And there's a direct payoff: your own missed calls become captured leads. You're an agency owner — you're on calls, in meetings, doing demos. Every call you can't take, your receptionist answers, takes a message, and pings you instantly by SMS and email. You're selling missed-call recovery; start by recovering your own.
2. It doubles as your demo line
Here's the part that makes this a sales asset, not an expense: this receptionist's phone number is the number you hand every prospect. "Don't take my word for it — call this number right now and talk to it." Hearing the product answer live converts better than anything you could say about it, and your own agency's receptionist is a demo you always have in your pocket, configured and warm.
3. Create it in the setup wizard
Open the setup wizard and create a receptionist for your agency exactly as you would for a customer — this run is your training:
- Paste your website URL. The receptionist reads it and drafts its own knowledge and prompt from what your site says. If you built your branded website first, paste that — your receptionist will introduce your agency the way your site does.
- Add the facts callers actually ask about: your FAQ, business address, and opening hours. For the FAQ, write down the five questions a prospect would ask — what it costs, how fast setup is, what happens after hours.
- Add your appointment booking link (Calendly or whatever you use) so the receptionist can book demo calls with prospects straight into your calendar.
- Pick a voice and languages. Listen to a few — this is the voice your prospects will judge the product by.
- Flip the white-label toggle. In the Reseller branding card, turn on White-label customer-facing communications. Now every email and SMS your receptionist sends carries your brand — and you'll see exactly what your future customers will see.
When you finish the wizard, your receptionist gets its own dedicated phone number. Call it. Ask it hard questions. Ask it something it can't know and watch how it handles that too — it takes a message and notifies you by SMS and email within seconds. You're about to promise this experience to customers; go feel it first.
4. Forward your own business line
The dedicated number works on its own, but the full experience is forwarding: set your existing business line to forward to your receptionist's number — either every call, or only the calls you don't answer — exactly the way your customers will connect their lines later. Now your real number never rings out, and you get a first-person preview of the onboarding step you'll walk every customer through. (One caveat: businesses on Google Voice unfortunately can't use the service, because Google Voice can't forward to virtual numbers — details in Call forwarding, explained.)
Give it a week of live traffic, then move to money: set up Stripe so customers can pay you automatically →
Stuck? Email partner support at hello@ring-ready.com and we'll walk you through it.