Three questions, asked several hundred times a month.

Building administration is deadline work: accounts, meetings, contractors, statutory dates. It is also a public-facing phone line, and the phone wins every time because a ringing phone is in the room and a deadline is not.

Most of the calls were three questions. What is my instalment plan. Have I paid, and what is left. What are the building's bank details. All three have exact answers that already exist in a file.

The fourth category was different and mattered more: someone reporting a fault. Those arrived in the same channel, got written on the same notepad, and were the ones you could not afford to lose.

The questions are about money and about a specific apartment. That makes a wrong recipient a data breach, not an inconvenience, and it settled the design before anything else.

The agent only answers numbers that are on the building register in the CRM. Not a password, not a code — a number either belongs to a known resident or gets nothing. Anyone not on the register reaches a human, which is the correct outcome anyway.

The second decision was about staleness. Building accounts are updated in cycles, so an answer that is correct today may not have been recomputed since last month. Every accounting answer therefore carries the date it was last reconciled. The agent is never allowed to imply it knows something more recent than it does.

Third: the agent does not guess. An unclear question gets a request for clarification or a handover to a person, because a confident wrong answer about someone's arrears costs more than a slow right one.

A dedicated WhatsApp number wired into the CRM, so the administrator and his colleagues see every conversation in one place whether the agent handled it or a person did.