Quick answer: to set up an AI voice agent for a client on Kestrel, sign up with a dedicated email for that client, configure the AI persona and a phone number, activate billing yourself, then invite the client's real email from the Team page — they set a password and land on a fully working dashboard with no onboarding wizard. The full breakdown, including what to do after handoff, is below. For the condensed step-by-step reference, see the developer & agency setup guide.
If you're a developer, freelancer, or agency building AI voice products for clients — HVAC contractors, dental offices, real estate teams, restaurants, or any service business that needs an AI phone agent — this guide walks through how Kestrel's account model actually works today, so you can configure a client's AI voice agent, hand off access cleanly, and keep supporting the account afterward.
This is written to be accurate about what's real in the product right now, not aspirational. Every step below maps to an actual page or setting in the Kestrel dashboard.
Each Kestrel account (tenant) has exactly one owner when it's created, and it's created the moment someone first signs in — there's no separate "create a blank account for someone else" step. In practice, that means the cleanest way to build and support a client's AI voice agent is:
If you manage multiple clients, use a separate email per client engagement (a "+" alias like you+clientname@yourdomain.com works fine with most providers). Each one becomes its own isolated account — completely separate data, calls, and configuration from every other client you manage.
Sign up at kestrelvoice.com/signup with the dedicated email for this client. You'll go through the same brief setup every new account sees — owner name and a callback number.
Open Settings → AI Agent Config (/settings/ai-agent) and set the greeting, conversation style, and business context. Then configure:
/settings/business-hours) — when the AI answers normally vs. after-hours behavior/settings/call-routing) — emergency keyword detection and where urgent calls get routed/settings/voice-instructions) — tone, phrasing, and things the AI should or shouldn't sayNone of this requires a phone number yet — the AI's configuration lives on the account itself and can be set (and changed later) independently of whether a number is attached.
Go to Settings → Phone Numbers (/settings/phone-numbers) and use "Purchase Number." You can search by area code and choose the exact number for this client, rather than letting the system auto-assign one. Picking a number here deliberately, before you activate billing, means nothing gets auto-provisioned behind your back later — the account already has its number by the time a plan goes live.
Go to Settings → Billing & Credits (/settings/billing) and choose a plan. Because you're doing this from inside the account (not sending your client through a public checkout link), activating billing here does not route anyone through an onboarding wizard — it's a direct checkout for the plan you selected, and you land back on the billing page once it's done.
If your client already saved a payment method to this account (see the handoff section below), the subscription bills to their card. Otherwise it bills to the email on file for the account, and you can update the payment method afterward from the same page.
Go to the Team page (/team) and create an invitation using your client's real email address. Choose their role — most client handoffs use Member or Admin. The invite is scoped to that specific email address, expires after the number of days you set (7 by default), and you'll get a shareable link and code you can send however you like, in addition to the automatic invite email.
When your client clicks the invite link:
Yes. Once your client has access to the account, they can add a payment method from Settings → Billing without that action starting a subscription, triggering onboarding, or provisioning a phone number. Saving a card and activating a plan are two separate actions — a saved card just means whenever a plan does get activated (by you or by them), it charges that card.
Setup isn't a one-time event. Because you (or your client) keep access to the account, ongoing tuning is just as real a part of the workflow as initial setup:
/settings/ai-training tracks extraction patterns the AI has learned from real calls, with an approval queue for new patterns and a configurable confidence threshold before something is auto-applied. When a live call surfaces an edge case the AI didn't handle well, this is where you review and correct it — approving reliable patterns and adjusting auto-learning sensitivity as the account matures.
/rag/content manages the website content the AI draws on to answer questions. You can add sources, trigger a rescrape after your client updates their website, and refresh what the AI knows without touching its core configuration. This is the right place to fix an AI answer that was wrong because its underlying source content was outdated.
Both are editable at any time from Settings, not just during initial setup — if a call reveals the AI mishandled a specific phrase or should route a new type of request differently, update it directly and the change applies to the next call.
In short: agent tuning and RAG source management aren't separate "advanced" features bolted onto onboarding — they're the same settings pages used for initial setup, revisited as ongoing maintenance whenever a live call shows something that needs adjusting.
A client who gets handed a working AI phone agent and just sets a password feels like they hired an expert. A client who has to self-serve through a generic signup — picking their own plan, choosing their own AI settings, searching for their own phone number — doesn't. This workflow keeps you in control of the configuration while giving your client a clean, single-step way in.
Ready to set up your first client account? Sign up at kestrelvoice.com/signup with a dedicated email for the engagement and follow the steps above.
KestrelVoice is an AI voice operations platform designed for service businesses. Our platform handles incoming calls 24/7, books appointments, routes emergencies, and integrates with your existing tools.