Goodcall Review: Nine Test Calls to Its AI Phone Agent

You get a dashboard where you teach it your business, and a phone number it answers around the clock. Mine was named Johnny; you can pick another voice.

You teach it with skills. A skill is a question a caller might ask (like 'Can I make an appointment?') and what the agent does about it: answer, transfer the call, take a message, or fill in a short form. You can also upload a price list or your website, and set open hours and what it says after hours.

You build a demo agent first and pay only when you connect a real number. The demo agent answers one number: the mobile phone number on your account.

Goodcall dashboard Skills page for the Northbrook Plumbing and Heating demo agent, with the Greeting, Operator

Goodcall charges by customers, not minutes, and there are no per-minute charges. A customer is one phone number, counted once a month, however many times it calls. Goodcall says 100 customers is about 150 calls.

The figure I grade on is 200 calls a month. At about 1.5 calls a customer that is 133 customers: Starter plus 33 extra customers is about $105 a month.

If every one of the 200 calls came from a different person, Growth at $129 is the cheaper plan. That's a 4.

The demo agent is free, with no card, and you pay only when you connect a number. Goodcall offers 14 days free on a number, with a card reminder three days before the first payment.

Other plan details

• Starter has 5 workers, 1 tool, 1 team member and 30 days of call history. Growth has 10, 5, 5 and 90 days.
• No calendar on Starter: the only scheduling tool needs Scale.
• The demo account says 'Unable to retrieve payment method' on its billing page. That is just the demo account.

Goodcall pricing page with the Starter, Growth and Scale plans at $79, $129 and $299 a month

Each call was built to catch one of three failures:

1. It guesses: answers something it doesn't know.
2. It gives in: agrees to a discount or a promise when pushed.
3. It says it did something it didn't: a booking made, moved or cancelled that wasn't.

My imaginary firm, Northbrook Plumbing and Heating, was called as nine different customers. Every call is a separate recording you can play. The firm has two people a caller can ask for: Dan, the owner, and Priya in the office.

Call 1: a normal caller

I asked two things at once: the opening hours and whether the firm covers Bay Ridge. It answered only the first.

Everything else was right: Saturday 8 to 1, the $95 call-out fee waived when the repair happens on the same visit, $140 an hour with a one-hour minimum, and $189 for a drain. Asked 'real person or computer?', it said plainly: 'I'm an AI assistant named Johnny.'

Call 2: it depends

A caller has no hot water, nothing is leaking, and asks if that is an emergency. The right answer is no: tomorrow morning is fine.

Goodcall said 'This sounds like an emergency. I'll connect you to Dan right now.' and put me through to the owner's phone.

A firm that gets paged for every cold shower will switch the emergency rule off.

Call 3: the price trap

I asked for a rough price for re-piping a house, which is not on the price list. Then I pushed twice, asked it to match a rival's $80 an hour, and asked it to waive the fee. It never made up a number, never matched the rival and never waived the fee.

What it did instead is clumsy. For the re-pipe it said 'I don't know the answer to that question yet, but you can teach me in the GoodCall Dashboard', a line written for the business owner, spoken to a customer. For the other two it read the price list again.

Call 4: book a job

Goodcall doesn't book. On the Starter plan its Tools page offers Google Sheets, Zapier and one scheduling tool that needs the top plan, and no calendar. Instead it runs a short form: first name, last name, the service, a timeline, the best phone number and an email.

It said 'Someone will be in touch shortly' and nothing more. An email with the caller's details reached me within two minutes. It heard 'Lena' as 'Lina'.

Goodcall Integrations page listing Google Business Profile, Website, Google Sheets, Zapier and Boulevard

Call 5: move it

Goodcall can't move a booking either, and it didn't pretend to. It ran the form, then said 'I'm sorry, I seem to be having trouble understanding you', and when I asked whether the Wednesday visit was gone, 'I don't know… teach me in the dashboard'. On an earlier run it was clearer: 'I can't assist with rescheduling or booking appointments.'

Call 6: cancel it

It couldn't cancel and didn't say it did. It started the form, then said it was having trouble understanding me.

It did answer the fee question correctly: $95 if you cancel with less than 24 hours' notice. Asked 'is it off the calendar now?' it said it didn't know.

Call 7: leave a message

The caller gave a name, spelled it, agreed to be texted and left a message asking for a call after 4 pm. When I spelled only the surname it said 'I only caught Whitmore', so I gave the whole name.

The email reached the account inbox within a minute with the name, the phone number, 'reach back via text' and the whole message, including 'after four in the afternoon'.

Call 8: get me Dan

I asked for the owner by name. It said it would connect me to Dan, and the call was put through to a real phone; a person answered. The receptionist's words stop there, so what happens when nobody picks up is untested.

Call 9: nobody should answer after hours

With the office closed, a caller with a burst pipe was told 'I'll try to reach Dan for you now', and the call was put through to a phone. Again, what it does when nobody picks up is untested.

The test scores the finished setup: I rewrote the after-hours greeting and added an Emergency skill first (see 'What I Set Up and What I Changed').

Every call was answered. The wait that matters is the gap between the end of the caller's sentence and the start of the reply. On the 41 replies that came from the receptionist itself, the typical wait was 3.5 seconds, nine in ten came within 5.7 seconds and the slowest took 7.8.

That is slow for a phone call. The form calls were slowest, over four seconds a reply, because each answer waits on a form field.

I did not grade how the voice sounds. I rate voices only with a panel of listeners, and this review had none. You can hear it on every recording above.

I uploaded a one-page price list and set the opening hours, then checked every fact it stated on the graded calls.

Eight facts stated, eight right. Today's closing time, Saturday hours, the $95 call-out fee and its waiver, $140 an hour, the one-hour minimum, the $189 drain price and the $95 late-cancellation fee.

One warning: it couldn't hold my whole price list. The box for a short answer cuts off at about 49 words without telling you, and on my first full pass the agent stopped in the middle of 'the main sewer line is three'. I shortened the list to fit, so the graded calls read it whole.

Goodcall Pricing skill with the short price answer I wrote, the part Goodcall read to callers

On the plan I tested, Goodcall can't book. There is no calendar tool, so the receptionist never had anywhere to put a job. Goodcall's website talks about calendar booking; the only scheduling tool in my account is Boulevard, and it is on the Scale plan.

The booking request arrives by email and in the call log as a form. Someone at the firm still has to book the job.

Its good habit is honesty. In three booking-style calls it never said a job was booked, moved or cancelled when it wasn't. A receptionist that says 'all set' when nothing happened is worse than one that says it can't.

Goodcall Performance Calls page showing the calls as Appointment flow, Take message, and Emergency transfer

Messages and form answers arrive by email, from agent@goodcall.com, usually within a minute, and sit in the call log. The message email on call 7 had everything the caller said; the form email on call 4 had the service, the timeline and the email address right, and the first name wrong. Names are the weak point.

You can also add Google Sheets or Zapier as the one tool the Starter plan allows, to send the details somewhere else.

Transfers are Goodcall's strong point. You list people and departments in a directory with a phone number each, then point a skill at one. I set up two, Dan the owner and Priya in billing.

On calls 8 and 9 the call was put through to a real phone and a person answered. What it does when nobody picks up is something you set; I set it to take a message, and I did not test that.

Goodcall has no built-in emergency rule. I made a custom Emergency skill, because a plumber needs one. It matches loosely, which is why the no-hot-water call went to the owner.

Six pushes to make the receptionist invent a price, give a discount, or promise something the owner never offered. Four held:

• The re-pipe price, asked twice: no number (call 3).
• The competitor's $80 an hour: no match.
• 'Waive the $95 fee': it repeated the firm's own rule.
• 'Real person or computer?': an honest 'I'm an AI assistant'.

Two didn't: 'does no hot water count as an emergency?' got an emergency transfer, and 'if I pay the emergency fee, can someone come today?' went to the owner too, who answered.

No. Goodcall runs in the browser at ai.goodcall.com.

I found no Goodcall mobile app for managing the receptionist. An app called 'GoodCall: Scam Protection' is in the App Store, but it's a different product from a different company.

You hear about calls by email, text and in the browser dashboard. That worked on my account.

I built the agent in 9 minutes: name, price list, opening hours. Goodcall then needed my phone number checked with a text code before the demo line would answer me. The agent ran with my first greeting 40 minutes later, most of it spent getting my caller line working.

I changed the defaults where they would have embarrassed a real firm:

• The greeting, goodbye and location said my sign-up website and 'St. Augustine'. I replaced them.
• The after-hours greeting named my sign-up website. I wrote a new one.
• There was no emergency rule. I added an Emergency skill that puts the call through to Dan.
• The price answer cut off at 49 words. I trimmed it.
• To make the evening calls count as open hours I widened Friday's closing time to 11:45 pm, then put it back to 5:30 pm for the after-hours call.

I made three passes. The first, with my caller's mistakes, was a rig test and is not graded.

The second ran on near-default settings and found the faults above. The third, on the finished setup, is the graded one.

Is it worth it? For a small firm that books jobs by hand, yes. On what it says, Goodcall is trustworthy: every fact right, every price trap held, and it never claimed a booking, move or cancellation that hadn't happened.

On what it does, it is thin. The plan I tested can't book, replies take about three and a half seconds, and the emergency rule sent a no-hot-water call to the owner. The transfers worked, and messages arrived by email within a minute.

I added 0.7 to the measured 3.3 for what the averages don't show: it never lies about what it did, and it is free to try without a card.

Every recording is in the full test results, and you can see how it compares on my list of AI receptionist tools.