Safety and escalation
An AI answering your phone is only worth having if it never embarrasses you. StrandCalls ships a set of hard guardrails that no setting, instruction, or caller pressure can turn off.
What the AI will never do
Section titled “What the AI will never do”- Invent a price. Quotes come from your service catalog as a structured lookup, read back. No catalog entry, no number.
- Invent an ETA. It states arrival times only after you’ve given one. See Emergency dispatch.
- Book an emergency for next Thursday. Urgent calls go through the dispatch loop, not the calendar.
- Play doctor, electrician, or lawyer. For anything with a safety or legal dimension it follows the script and escalates rather than diagnosing.
- Re-ask what it already knows. Returning callers aren’t made to repeat their address.
Per-trade safety scripts
Section titled “Per-trade safety scripts”Your trade type in Settings → Business Profile selects the safety script the AI runs — exactly one, chosen for you. These are the “before anything else, do this” moments. Four trades have one today:
| Trade | What the script does |
|---|---|
| Plumbing | Coaches the caller to the shutoff valve before anything else; gas smell means leave the house and call 911 from outside; sewage backup is always urgent |
| Electrical | Asks about fire or smoke first, then coaches only “turn off the breaker” — never wiring, never a diagnosis. A single dead outlet is explicitly not treated as an emergency |
| HVAC | A three-question vulnerability triage on any no-heat or no-cool call — who’s in the home, the indoor temperature, whether there’s a safe backup — so a no-AC call with an elderly resident isn’t handled like a routine one |
| Pest control | Routine pests book normally; an active indoor termite swarm is escalated, and an allergic reaction in progress is 911 first |
Scripts for locksmith / towing and garage door ship with the product and switch on automatically if those trades become selectable. The locksmith script carries the life-safety rule that matters most: a child or pet locked in a hot car gets 911 first, every time, before any conversation about service.
The common thread is that the script front-loads the safety step and then gets out of the way. None of them make the AI alarmist about routine work — several say so explicitly, because a receptionist that treats every call as an emergency is as useless as one that treats none of them that way.
The scripts aren’t editable — they’re the same for everyone in a trade, which is the point. Settings → Safety & Escalation carries a single Safety coaching scripts switch, on by default. Turning it off silences the script for hazardous situations while leaving everything else intact, which is a decision worth taking only on advice from your insurer or your lawyer.
Escalation re-alert timing and your dispatch alert phone are on the same screen — see Emergency dispatch.
The escalation guarantee
Section titled “The escalation guarantee”When the AI is out of its depth, the correct behavior is to stop and get you — not to improvise. Escalation is a guaranteed path: the call produces a message, a notification, and a record, rather than a confident wrong answer.
This is why “I’ll have the owner call you back” is a feature. It is the honest ceiling of what a receptionist should decide alone.
Owner-verified fact sheets
Section titled “Owner-verified fact sheets”For statements that carry legal or contractual weight — licensing, insurance, warranty terms, service-area claims — the AI reads from fact sheets you have explicitly verified, not from anything it inferred. Each is a topic and a short answer, and the AI quotes it as written.
- Only verified sheets are used. Editing a sheet clears its verification until you re-verify it, so a half-finished edit can never reach a caller.
- Up to five sheets are loaded on a call, yours taking precedence over any StrandCalls ships, most recently verified first.
- If a caller asks something no fact sheet covers, the AI says it would rather have you confirm than guess, and takes a message.
Fact sheets are managed in Settings → Safety & Escalation.
Recording and consent
Section titled “Recording and consent”Two different things are easy to conflate here.
Transcripts are always kept — they come from the conversation itself, and they’re what the summary, lead quality, and safety review are built from.
Audio recording is off until you turn it on, in Settings → AI Receptionist. Recording law varies by state, which is why it isn’t on for you by default. If your state or your customers require a specific spoken disclosure, raise it with support — this is not something to improvise in custom instructions.
Texting has its own, separate consent, captured on the call before the AI sends anything. See Texting consent and opt-outs.
Never tier-gated
Section titled “Never tier-gated”Every safety script, the escalation guarantee, and emergency dispatch ship identically on every plan. Charging more for safety would be a moral hazard; it isn’t a lever we pull.
Auditing what actually happened
Section titled “Auditing what actually happened”Read transcripts in Calls. Every quote the AI gave is logged, every escalation is recorded, and every dispatch has a state history. Calls are also scored for safety after they end, which is what suppresses a review request on a job that went badly. If you ever suspect the AI said something it shouldn’t have, the evidence is there — and it’s worth telling support about.