Call Intents — How Your Agent Handles Different Call Types

Every phone call has a purpose — the caller wants something. Intents are how you define those purposes and tell your agent what to do with each one.

What Intents Are

An intent is a named type of call your business receives, with natural language instructions for how to handle it. A dental office might define:

• Schedule Appointment: "When a caller wants to book, reschedule, or cancel an appointment. Ask for their preferred date and time. Check availability if we have a calendar connected."
• Insurance Question: "Caller asking about coverage or accepted providers. Check our accepted insurance list."
• Emergency: "Dental emergency that needs immediate attention. Transfer to clinical staff immediately."

Each intent has a name and a description. The description is where the real power is — it's the workflow instruction your agent follows.

How Intent Detection Works

Your agent works out what each caller needs from the context of the conversation. It doesn't ask the caller to state their intent — it listens and figures it out naturally, then follows the matching intent's instructions. After the call, the primary intent is recorded on the call summary.

Why Intents Matter

• Agent behavior: the description tells the agent exactly how to handle each call type. "Ask for their preferred date" vs "transfer immediately" — these are instructions, not just labels.
• Call summaries show the detected intent for each call, so you can see at a glance what people are calling about.

Default Intents

Every new agent starts with three universal intents: Speak to a person, General inquiry, and Complaint. If you set up through a discovery call with Allison, intents specific to your business are generated from that conversation. Otherwise, add your own or pick from the ready-made library in the Call handling step of Build your agent. You can add, update, enable, disable, or delete intents at any time — through the dashboard or by asking Allison.

Pure lookups like hours or address don't need an intent. They're handled by Schedules and Locations.

How Intents Work With Other Features

Intents don't need to duplicate what other features already handle:

• Facts and FAQs define your business rules (cancellation policy, refund policy as content). The intent description can reference them: "Check our cancellation policy before confirming."
• Knowledge documents provide detailed procedures. The intent points the agent in the right direction; the agent looks up the details when it needs them.
• Escalation rules define when and where to transfer. Intents describe what to do with a call; escalation rules decide when a human is needed.
• Calendar integrations handle the booking mechanics. The intent says "check availability before confirming"; the calendar tools do the actual checking.