Most of what arrives at the front desk is the same forty questions: opening hours, where the order is, how to return something, whether you deliver to a postcode, what the warranty covers. Answering them well takes a person off the work only a person can do. Answering them badly, or slowly, is how a customer becomes a former one.
Front Desk answers the common questions from your approved material only, tells the truth when the answer is not on file, and hands anything else to a person with the whole history attached. It never promises a person is not needed.
The approved material is the boundary. Your policies, your FAQs, your product pages, your service hours, written down and signed off. If the answer is in there, the agent gives it. If it is not, the agent says so and a person takes it.
Email, the website chat if you have one, messages on the channels you name. Within your published service hours, or around the clock with a clear note that a person is back at nine. Which of those is your decision, made in the audit.
What is being asked, who is asking, and whether there is an order, an account or a previous conversation to attach. A customer who has written three times is recognised as one conversation, not three.
Opening hours, returns, delivery areas, warranty terms, order status where the system can be read: answered directly, quoting your wording, with a link to the page it came from. Nothing paraphrased into something you did not say.
A question the material does not cover gets an honest reply: a person will answer, and by when. The agent does not guess, does not improvise and does not fill the silence with something plausible.
Complaints, refunds, anything about money, anything the customer marks as urgent, anything the agent could not answer: to a named person, with the whole thread, the account record and what the agent already said. The customer never repeats themselves.
Hardy logs every question, whether it was answered or handed over, and what the person did next. The questions it could not answer become a monthly list, which is how the approved material grows, by your decision, one page at a time.
Anything outside those rules waits for a named person.
We do not yet have a permissioned customer case to publish for this agent, so here is the next most honest thing: a test we ran ourselves, with the inputs stated. When a client agrees to be named, their measured resolution rate will replace this.
A test desk we assembled from anonymised enquiry types, run on 5 September 2026. It shows the format and the division of labour. It is not a measurement of any customer's service desk, and the counts are not a forecast of yours.
Measured on, when it is live for you: questions resolved from the approved material without a person, time to first reply out of hours, and replies that could not be traced to the material, which should be zero and is checked. The audit sets the baseline before anything is built.
Shared mailboxes on Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace, your website's own pages as the material, and the order or account system for status questions, read only. HubSpot, Salesforce and the others on the integrations list. Up to three systems in a First Agent.
The forty questions and their answers, signed off once; the hours a person is available; and the name of the person a complaint goes to. The audit assembles the first version of the material from what you already publish.
Regulated advice, where every reply needs a qualified person. A desk whose questions are mostly unique. Fewer than about fifteen enquiries a day, where a person answering is simpler than a handover queue. We will tell you either in the audit.
A £1,500 two-week audit, credited in full against the build. Front Desk is normally a First Agent at a fixed £6,500, live in three to four weeks, then from £450 a month to run and watch it, plus £40 to £200 a month paid directly to the providers. Not VAT registered, so no VAT is added. The full price list.
Roughly how many enquiries a day, which channels, and who answers them now. That is enough for a first conversation, and we will tell you whether Front Desk is the right first agent or whether another one is.