Your first Specialist

A Specialist is only as good as what you teach it. The good news: teaching it well takes an afternoon, not a project plan. This guide covers the three things that separate a great Specialist from a mediocre one.

Write knowledge like you'd brief a new hire

The knowledge base isn't a legal document — it's the briefing you'd give a sharp new employee on their first day. Concrete beats comprehensive:

• Good: "Standard bathroom reno runs $12k–$25k depending on size. Never quote a fixed price on the phone — book a site visit."
• Not useful: "We offer competitive pricing on a range of renovation solutions."

The Specialist handles conversation on its own. Your job is the facts and boundaries: what things cost, what's bookable, what's off-limits, what gets escalated.

Set the voice deliberately

Under Specialist → Voice & Tone, you choose how it sounds and how it talks. Three settings matter most:

• Introduction — how it answers. "Thanks for calling Apex Plumbing, this is Ivy" works for most businesses. If you want explicit AI disclosure up front, set it here.
• Register — from "warm and casual" to "polished and formal". Match your counter, not your lawyer.
• Pace rules — short answers by default, detail only when asked. Callers hang up on lectures.

Define the handoff before you need it

Every Specialist needs to know when a human takes over. Set escalation rules under Specialist → Handoffs:

• Always transfer: angry callers, legal or complaint language, anything involving a refund over your threshold.
• Transfer when available: named-person requests, negotiations, VIP accounts.
• Never handle: whatever you decide is human-only — the Specialist will take a message and book a callback instead.

Warm transfers include a spoken summary to the human picking up, so nobody asks the caller to repeat themselves.

Review the first twenty calls

For the first few days, skim every transcript (Calls → Review queue). You're looking for two things: answers you'd phrase differently — fix the knowledge, not the transcript — and questions it couldn't answer, which are missing knowledge entries. Specialists improve in exactly one way: you making the briefing better. Twenty reviewed calls in, most businesses stop finding things to fix.