Upfirst is an AI answering service positioned as a virtual receptionist for small businesses. It answers calls on a business's behalf, helping it avoid missing potential customers or making customers wait, and claims that more than 1,000 businesses already use it.
Main uses and capabilities:
- Answer incoming calls: as an AI receptionist, it answers calls on the business's behalf, with round-the-clock coverage.
- Collect lead information: it gathers information from callers and can send the details to the business by email or SMS. In the example, it can record a potential customer's name, reason for calling, and deadline.
- Schedule appointments: during the call, it checks the business calendar and books available times.
- Transfer with context: during a warm transfer, it tells the business who the caller is and what they need, and the business decides whether to take the call; keypress answering can also be set up.
- Business information training: you can add business hours, services, and prices, or import directly from a website.
- Multilingual support: it answers in English, Spanish, and more than 35 other languages, and can switch with the caller's language.
- Block nuisance calls: it automatically identifies and hangs up on robocalls and sales calls, and does not charge for nuisance calls.
- Third-party integrations: it can schedule with Google Calendar, Outlook, Calendly, Acuity, Square, and Clio, connect to apps with APIs through Custom Actions, and connect to thousands of apps through Zapier.
- ChatGPT/Claude setup: it can be added to ChatGPT as a plug-in or to Claude as a connector, and you can update the receptionist configuration by describing your needs in natural language.
How to use it:
- Sign up for an account and enter your website; Upfirst uses this as a starting point to train the receptionist, after which it can be modified.
- You can connect ChatGPT or Claude to set it up for you.
- Live chat support is available, along with a free 30-minute onboarding call.
- You can keep your existing business number and forward calls to Upfirst; each plan also comes with an Upfirst number.
- You can forward all calls, only missed calls, or only after-hours calls, and this can be changed in your phone settings or the phone system's online portal.
- When a caller asks for a human, the call can be transferred to the business or a team member, or the receptionist can politely explain that no one is available right now and promise a call back.
- You can edit the greeting, update training content, text links to callers, set up call forwarding, view calls and transcripts, and connect your own tools.
Applicable scenarios:
- Scenarios such as small business owners, property managers, clinics, law firms, and service-based merchants that need phone reception but cannot answer at all times.
- Scenarios that require screening leads, booking appointments, transferring urgent calls, and blocking nuisance calls.
- Scenarios with multilingual customer calls.
Facts related to costs and limitations:
- Plans start at $24.95 per month, include 30 calls; annual payment gets 20% off; custom plans are available for more than 600 calls per month.
- A two-week free trial is provided.
- Nuisance calls are not charged; calls under 15 seconds or where the caller does not speak (such as misdials) are not billed and will be marked in the call log.
- You can upgrade or downgrade at any time, there is no contract, and you can cancel in your account.
- The free trial information mentions that no credit card is required.
Not yet provided: the detailed feature differences between specific plans, per-call duration limits, overage billing standards, details of data storage and privacy policies, service availability SLAs, the list of specific CRM integrations supported, and so on are not yet provided in the materials.
