GUIDE 01
Writing your knowledge base.
Your knowledge base is the foundation Piquup runs on. It's how the AI knows your services, your hours, your prices, your policies, your edge cases. The richer it is, the better the AI handles unusual questions.
What to include
The basics: services and what they cost, hours and locations, what to bring to appointments, who handles which kinds of calls, insurance you accept, parking and directions.
The patterns: questions you answer every week. The five things people ask when they're new. The two things existing clients always ask. The objection that comes up before they book.
The edge cases: the requests you decline (and why). The conditions that should escalate to a human. The seasonal exceptions to your normal hours.
How to write entries
Plain language. Like you're training a new front-desk hire on their first day. Short answers, specific numbers, no marketing fluff. If you wouldn't say it to a person on the phone, don't write it in the knowledge base.
What to leave out
Anything that requires real-time human judgment (medical advice, legal advice, custom quotes that vary by case). Put escalation rules around those — the AI captures the question and routes it to you.
GUIDE 02
Writing escalation rules.
Escalation rules decide what hits your phone vs. what stays in the dashboard. Most owners get this wrong in two ways: either they alert on everything (and stop reading the texts), or they alert on nothing (and miss the call that mattered).
Start permissive, then tighten
In your first week, alert on more than you think you need. Watch which alerts you actually act on vs. which you ignore. Then turn off the ones you ignore.
Good defaults
Always alert: anything urgent (medical symptoms, legal emergency, post-business-hours hot leads), VIP customers (your top 20), high-value bookings (Botox over $500, retainers over $5K).
Maybe alert: new patient intake (you might want to review before they arrive), refund requests, scheduling conflicts the AI flagged.
Never alert: routine bookings, routine rescheduling, anonymous price inquiries, general info questions.
The 5-second test
Before saving an alert rule, ask: would I drop what I'm doing for this? If yes, alert. If no, dashboard.
GUIDE 03
Your first 30 days.
Most owners over-engineer their setup before launch and under-tune it after launch. The first 30 days should be the opposite: launch with the basics, then refine based on what you see.
Week 1
Watch the dashboard daily. Look for calls that ended without a clear outcome — those are the gaps in your knowledge base. Look for calls where the AI escalated when it didn't need to — those are the rules to relax.
Week 2
Look at what didn't book. Were the questions you couldn't answer? Was the timing wrong? Were the prices a deal-breaker? The "didn't book" calls tell you more about your funnel than the booked ones do.
Week 3
Look at after-hours volume. If most of your booked calls came after 5pm, that's the case for keeping Piquup running 24/7 even if you're closed. If almost no after-hours calls book, you can simplify the after-hours script and route urgent ones only.
Week 4
Look at source attribution. Where do the calls come from? Google, referrals, Instagram, signage? The pattern tells you where to spend marketing budget — and where the AI is converting vs. where it isn't.