FAQ: Phone Answering + Calendar + CRM + SMS — Answers for Busy Owners

The questions service-business owners ask before they hand a phone line to an AI: trust, privacy, missed-call risk, setup, pricing fit, and how it compares to a human receptionist. Plain-English answers — no pitch, no agency review required. /faq has the full objection list; this post hits the ones new readers hit first.

Trust + privacy

• What does the AI disclosure line say? — The same disclosure on every channel, including "You're messaging our AI assistant. By replying, you consent to receive AI-generated responses and to have your messages used for customer service and recordkeeping. Message frequency may vary. Message and data rates may apply. Reply STOP to opt out. Terms: /terms Privacy: /privacy"
• What about call recording and transcripts? — Call data, recordings, transcripts, and consent are all on the same ledger. /security walks through how the data is handled at rest and in transit.
• Where does the data live? — Server-side processing, per-tenant isolation. No agency, no separate vendor, no lead-pool across customers.

Phone + calendar + CRM + SMS

• Which calendar connectors ship? — Use Analese Calendar or connect the calendar you already use. Calendar integration is on every plan.
• Which CRM connectors ship? — Fourteen, covering the verticals Analese sells into: HubSpot, Clio, Lawmatics, Follow Up Boss, KV Core, WiseAgent, Housecall, Jobber, Mindbody, EzyVet, Dentrix, WebPT, QuickBooks Online, and Vagaro.
• What SMS features are included? — Missed-call text-back, SMS appointment updates (4 kinds: confirmation, change, cancellation, reminder), voicemail summary delivery, and review-request automation. All on Team and Multi-location.
• How does the SMS pipeline handle disclosure and opt-out? — Every outbound SMS opens with the shared disclosure line on the first send. STOP-family keywords (STOP, CANCEL, END, QUIT, STOPALL, UNSUBSCRIBE) opt the number out for good, on the same consent ledger.

Setup + pricing

• Setup FAQs — onboarding is the four-step /how-it-works chain: signup, connect your calendar and phone, describe your business, AI goes live. Connector setup is a checklist in the dashboard, no developer ticket.
• Pricing — Solo $99/mo, Team $299/mo (includes A-CRM), Multi-location $899/mo. A-CRM is a $39/mo add-on on Solo. Phone answering, calendar integration, and the daily summary are on every plan.
• Cancellation — billing prorates automatically through Stripe. Upgrade or downgrade from your dashboard; the success page verifies and flips the feature gates.

A buyer question: what about vertical-tuning?

Each preset — dental, legal, real estate, contractor, vet, salon/spa, automotive, auto repair — pre-tunes the receptionist against transcripts of real front-desk calls from that vertical. The disclosures are right, the handoff language is right, the intake script is right. The /for/<vertical> landing pages walk through what vertical-tuning looks like per industry. Each vertical is a configuration, not a separate pipeline.

A buyer question: how is this different from a human receptionist?

A human receptionist is great at nuance but expensive at every hour of the day, hard to scale past one shift, and limited to the languages your team speaks. The AI receptionist runs 24/7, scales as calls scale, and never gets sick. It does the heavy lifting on the routine calls (booking, qualifying, intake) and queues the ones that need a human handoff, so your team works the high-value interactions, not the spam.