For a business with more than one site, the most damaging answer is not a made-up one. It is a correct answer about the wrong branch. "Open Saturday, 9am to 1pm" is perfectly true for a physiotherapy group's city centre clinic. It is no use to the visitor who lives near the other clinic, which is closed on Saturdays, and who turns up to a locked door.
Nothing about that answer was invented. It came straight from the website, and it shows the core risk of an AI receptionist across multiple locations. The website, like many multi-site businesses' websites, talks about opening hours in three places with no clear sense of which clinic each one belongs to.
So the job is mostly about preventing that one failure. Get the structure right and a single receptionist can handle several sites well.
Where wrong-branch answers come from
When you teach a receptionist from your website, it reads what is there. On a single-site business, "We're open until 6pm" is unambiguous. On a three-site business, that sentence on a shared services page is a trap.
The usual culprits:
- Shared pages with site-specific details tucked in, such as a general FAQ that mentions one branch's parking.
- Old branch pages still live after a location moved or changed hours.
- Price lists without a location label, where one site charges more because of rent.
- Staff pages that list practitioners without saying where they work.
The receptionist cannot tell which branch a sentence refers to if a human reading it cold could not tell either. That is a useful test to run on your own pages.
Give each location a fact sheet
The fix is dull and effective: one clearly labelled block of information per location, written so every line makes sense on its own.
| Field | Example for one site |
|---|---|
| Location name | Northgate clinic |
| Address and parking | 14 Northgate Street, free parking behind the building |
| Opening hours | Mon to Fri 8am to 7pm, closed weekends |
| Holiday closures | Closed 24 December to 2 January |
| Services offered here | Physiotherapy, sports massage (no hydrotherapy at this site) |
| Prices, if they differ | Initial assessment £65 |
| Who works here | Two physiotherapists, one sports massage therapist |
| How to contact this site | Direct number and email |
Repeat the location name inside the text, not just in a heading. "Northgate clinic is closed at weekends" survives being read out of context. "Closed at weekends" does not. This works equally well as an uploaded document per branch or a set of Q&A pairs, whichever you find easier to keep up to date.
Make it ask before it answers
Once the content is separated, the second half of the job is behaviour. Tell the receptionist, in plain language, that questions about hours, availability, prices, parking or staff differ by location, and that it should find out which location the visitor means first.
Visitor: Are you open Saturday?
Assistant: It depends on the clinic. Which one are you thinking of: Northgate, Riverside or the city centre?
Visitor: Riverside
Assistant: Riverside clinic is closed on Saturdays. It's open Monday to Friday, 8am to 6pm. The city centre clinic is open Saturday mornings from 9am to 1pm, if that's easier for you.
That one extra turn costs the visitor a few seconds. The alternative is a confident wrong answer, which costs a wasted journey and a bad review.
Where a page makes the location obvious, such as a branch's own page, you can tell the receptionist to assume that location but confirm it lightly ("For Riverside, yes..."). Questions that are the same everywhere, such as what a first appointment involves, need no location at all. And for a clinic, whatever the location, the receptionist gives information rather than clinical advice: symptoms go to a practitioner, and anything urgent goes to the emergency services.
One receptionist or several
There is no single right answer, but these rules of thumb hold up:
- One receptionist suits locations that share a website, a brand and most services. Content is easier to keep consistent, and visitors can be pointed to a nearby alternative.
- One per location suits branches with their own websites, very different offerings, or managers who each want control of their own content.
- One per brand is the right split when locations trade under different names. Running assistants for several brands covers that setup.
On SpideyChat, Starter includes 3 assistants and Pro includes 10, so either approach fits within a plan for most small groups.
Getting each enquiry to the right branch
A captured lead that just says "wants an appointment" lands in a shared inbox and waits while three managers each assume someone else has it. Make the location a required detail on every lead, alongside name, contact and what they need.
From there, routing is straightforward:
- Switch on lead capture and ask the receptionist to always record the chosen location.
- Switch on the webhook action so each lead is sent as a JSON POST to your automation tool, CRM or Slack.
- In that tool, add a rule per location that sends the lead to the right branch's channel or person.
- Give each branch a daily habit of clearing its own leads.
Sending leads to a CRM with webhooks walks through the webhook side, and routing leads to the right person automatically covers rules. The docs have the technical detail.
A worked example of the setup time
This is an illustration for a three-site business. Writing a fact sheet takes about 30 minutes per location if the branch manager helps, so 90 minutes. Fixing unlabelled hours and prices on the website takes another hour. Adding the ask-first instruction and testing ten questions per branch takes about 45 minutes.
Call it half a day. Against one Saturday no-show per month per branch, it pays back quickly in goodwill alone.
What to do first with a multi-site setup
Open your website and search every page for opening hours, prices and "parking". Anywhere those appear without a location named in the same sentence, fix it or remove it. Then write the first fact sheet for your busiest branch (an AI receptionist for multiple locations is only as good as these sheets), test the receptionist against it with a few real questions, and copy the format for the others.