Configure Your Receptionist
Set up Cora's voice, choose how inbound calls route, and control how she escalates to your team.
Your careCycle account comes equipped with Cora, an expert-trained inbound receptionist designed to handle inbound calls from existing members or prospective members from organic sources such as referrals and your website.
Cora can answer common questions beneficiaries ask, including:
- Benefit and coverage questions from Summary of Benefits data
- ID card questions
- Prescription costs
- Provider network questions
- Plan shopping and rate changes
- Concerns and complaints
When a member needs more support from your team, Cora can create Inquiries, transfer calls, or book appointments. How and when she does this is controlled through Assistant Behaviors.
Open Campaigns, then the pinned Receptionist at the top of the list. Its Configuration, Assembly, and Overview tabs bring setup, employee review, and activity into the campaign workspace. Older Receptionist links redirect here. For ordinary campaigns, use Campaign Types and Configuration.
Name and Voice
Cora is yours to shape. Edit her name in the campaign header and choose/preview her voice in Configuration > Conversation. Apply pending configuration with the header Save action. Review employee wording and proposals in Assembly.
Choose How Inbound Calls Route
In Configuration > Conversation, choose who answers during operating hours and outside operating hours:
- AI Receptionist: AI answers during the selected periods, handles what it can, and escalates the rest according to your Assistant Behaviors. This is the right choice for most agencies.
- Team during operating hours: select a routing group so eligible agents receive incoming calls. Review the group's incoming fallback if nobody connects.
- After hours: choose AI or Unavailable. Unavailable plays an announcement and ends the call; it does not record a caller message.
AI during both periods and team-during-hours/AI-after-hours are common setups. Review required resources and shared scope when changing the policy. Retained legacy forwarding or number-service settings can remain active until explicitly changed.
Human-handled reception does not turn the Receptionist into an Agent Queue campaign. It remains your organization-owned main-line campaign. Direct human incoming calls use the selected routing group's incoming fallback and applicable callback policy. An AI-controlled transfer uses that destination's separate Voice AI transfer fallback. With daytime agents and after-hours unavailable handling, the unavailable message inherits from the selected routing group.
Before You Configure Behaviors
Behaviors hand calls and bookings to your team through two building blocks. careCycle created a starter version of each when your Receptionist's number was provisioned, so both already exist, but read through and adjust them before working through the behaviors table:
- Routing groups: where live calls route. Make sure the starter routing group has the right agents added, and create any others you need.
- Calendars: how appointments get booked. Review appointment length, booking hours, and who appointments route to.
The Transfer Call and Book Appointment options in the behaviors table stay disabled until a routing group or calendar exists to point at. You can also open either editor right from the table using its Manage option.
Your careCycle representative will walk through both in your onboarding session.
Escalations (Assistant Behaviors)
Cora is here to help you provide world-class member service and make sure every beneficiary feels heard. Sometimes that means getting a human involved.
Escalations (labeled Assistant Behaviors on the Receptionist page) control how, when, and to whom member needs get passed.
After fielding millions of member conversations, our team has grouped member questions into defined Scenarios. For each scenario, you decide what Cora should do:
- Handle it herself
- Create an Inquiry for follow-up
- Transfer the call live
- Book an appointment
Recommended Starting Behaviors
| Scenario | Recommended behavior |
|---|---|
| Plan benefit or coverage question | Cora answers from Summary of Benefits data |
| Prescription pricing | Cora answers from formulary data |
| Provider network lookup | Cora answers and offers a callback if not found |
| ID card request | Create Inquiry, assigned user follows up |
| Plan complaint or grievance | Transfer live to assigned agent |
| Plan shopping or re-enrollment | Book appointment with writing agent |
Review the actual saved starting assignments. Choose Log Inquiry when the team should handle the need asynchronously, and enable transfers or booking only for the intended scenarios and verified destinations.
Use Configuration > Scenarios & escalations for those assignments. Behaviors can differ between business hours and after hours, so a scenario that transfers live during the day can create an Inquiry overnight instead.
Watch Cora Work
Overview and the pinned campaign card show recorded activity over their labeled windows: calls, talk time, after-hours calls, inquiries, and appointments. Callback attempts and resolved-inquiry status are different evidence; neither alone proves autonomous resolution. Employee simulations check conversation behavior, while live routing and human fallback need their own verification.