Somebody phoning to cancel was treated as somebody phoning to book. The word “appointment” appears in both, and the AI took “I need to cancel my appointment” as the start of a new booking — so it read out available times, told the caller their appointment was booked, and sent them a verification code to confirm a booking they were ringing up to get rid of. It stayed on that footing for the rest of the call.
No appointment was ever created — the flow stopped before anything was written down, so nobody’s diary was affected and no cancellation was silently turned into a booking. The damage was to the caller, who could ring off believing their appointment was cancelled when nothing had happened, and to you, because nobody was told they wanted to cancel.
What happens now. A caller asking to cancel or move an appointment is recognised as doing exactly that. The AI says plainly that it cannot change an appointment itself, takes their details, and passes the request to your team so a person can deal with it. It no longer offers times, and it never claims to have cancelled anything. Asking to move or reschedule an appointment — including “push it back an hour” — is handled the same way.
Separately: if one of your services has a word like “emergency” in its name, it no longer sets off an alarm. A business offering “Emergency callout”, “Injury assessment”, “Legal consultation” or “Complaint handling” found that a caller simply naming the service was answered as though they were making a complaint. The AI now recognises your own service names for what they are. Genuine emergencies, complaints, injuries, legal threats and requests for a manager are all still escalated exactly as before — we test each of those specifically, because that is the one thing that must not get quieter.