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.
You configure all of this from the Receptionist page in the sidebar.
Name and Voice
Cora comes ready to work, but she is yours to shape. From the Receptionist page you can rename her and choose her voice. Preview any voice before you commit, and change it whenever you like.
Choose How Inbound Calls Route
The Receptionist page gives you two routing modes for your main number:
- AI Receptionist: Cora answers every call, resolves what she can, and escalates the rest according to your Assistant Behaviors. This is the right choice for most agencies.
- Direct to Agent: calls ring your team's softphones first, so members reach a person immediately during business hours. After hours, calls route to Cora instead of voicemail.
You can switch modes at any time.
Direct to Agent is not an agent-first campaign. It is a Receptionist mode that rings humans during business hours and routes calls to Cora after hours. If its softphone destination is also shared with agent-first campaigns, the destination's agent-first callback offer and business-hours or after-hours greetings apply only to those agent-first campaigns. They do not apply to the Receptionist or other Voice AI campaigns.
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:
- Transfer destinations: where live calls route. Make sure the starter destination has the right agents added, and create any others you need.
- Appointment settings: 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 transfer destination or appointment configuration exists to point at. You can also open either editor right from the table using its Manage option.
Your Forward Deployed Engineer will walk through both in your onboarding session.
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.
Assistant Behaviors let you configure escalations, controlling 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 |
Out of the box, every scenario is set to Log Inquiry, the safest default: nothing gets transferred or booked until you say so. Configuring your Receptionist is mostly the act of upgrading the right scenarios to live transfers and appointment booking.
You can adjust these at any time from the Assistant Behaviors table on the Receptionist page. 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
Once Cora is live, the Receptionist page shows her impact over the last 30 days: calls answered, after-hours saves, inquiries raised, and appointments booked. It is the quickest way to see what your receptionist is handling so your team does not have to.