Solutions
Twenty-odd trades with the same telephone problem
Each page below is about one kind of business, or one situation. It carries the concrete workflow, the tools the assistant calls, what stays written after the call, and a list of what it does not do for that trade.
These are not twenty versions of the same page. What differs between them is what the assistant asks, which tool it calls and where it stops — and that last part is written out on each page separately.
If you know what business you run
The order is not alphabetical but grouped by the shape of the call: appointments first, then selling and call-outs, then orders and delivery, then money and paperwork.
- Dental practices Bookings, reschedules, SMS confirmations, and emergencies passed to a person.
- Medical clinics Booking by speciality, test preparation, rescheduling. Triage stays with people.
- Veterinary clinics Consultations, vaccination recalls, boarding holds. Emergencies are never triaged by software.
- Salons and gyms Appointments taken, reminders dialled, the freed slot offered again.
- Pharmacies Stock checked through your own system, reservation recorded, hours given. No advice.
- Car service and dealers Service slots booked, symptom recorded, SMS confirmation, and the sales lead into the CRM.
- Real estate Qualified on budget, area and timing, a viewing offered from the calendar, the lead in the CRM.
- Property management Faults opened as tickets, statement questions, readings. Emergencies go to a person at once.
- Trades and call-outs Call-out taken, address and fault recorded, an arrival window offered.
- Hotels Accommodation enquiries, facility questions, group business passed to sales.
- Restaurants Reservations with covers, time and special requirements, written to the calendar.
- Travel agencies Destination, dates, party size, budget. Lead in the CRM, callback in the calendar.
- Online shops Looked up in Shopify or WooCommerce by phone number, order status read back on the call.
- Courier and logistics A confirmation campaign, redeliveries, address checks. With a reason for every skipped call.
- Utilities Readings, bills, outages and dispatch routing on the same telephone line.
- Internet providers Report taken, subscriber identified, ticket opened, the known outage communicated.
- Local government Hours, required paperwork, request status. No documents issued and no fees taken.
- IT services Identification, a ticket opened in Zendesk or Jira, escalation to the on-call engineer.
- Banks and lenders Intent routing, request intake, handover to an operator. No strong customer authentication.
- Insurance Quote details, loss recorded, renewals dialled. No policy is ever issued by software.
- Debt collection Legal calling window, suppression list, the promise to pay written into your system.
- Accounting firms Calls ahead of the deadline, documents chased, promises recorded against the client.
- Notaries The document list read from your own files, the slot booked. No legal advice.
- Funeral services Only necessary details, a short register, the person on duty paged at once.
- Schools and courses Fees, timetable and paperwork answered, visits and assessments booked into the calendar.
- Recruiting Availability, location, salary expectation, interview booked. The decision stays with a person.
If you know what hurts
These situations turn up in trades that resemble each other in no other way, and they are often searched more than the industry name is. A restaurant and a clinic have the same problem at nine in the evening.
B2B lead qualification
Qualified on budget, authority and timing, meeting booked into the salesperson calendar.
After hours
Request taken, ticket opened, summary sent to Slack or to email.
Reminders and no-shows
Confirmed, moved or cancelled, recorded on the booking. The freed slot can be re-offered.
Missed-call callback
Immediate callback, the reason established, a booking made or a person brought in.
First line and routing
Intent routing, context gathered before the transfer, the right queue first time.
Phone surveys
A short survey after delivery or a call-out. Opt-out honoured immediately.
Switchboard replacement
Routing to a person, a queue or an extension. With the unfinished parts stated.
Multilingual reception
Language pinned explicitly rather than guessed. Routed on the first few seconds.
What you will not find on these pages
There is no growth percentage, no guaranteed saving and no case study about a company that never gave us permission to name it. The product has placed eleven real calls so far, several of which failed, and that is written on the status page rather than hidden.
What each page does carry is the tools the assistant calls, under the names they have in the code, and a section on what it does not do for that trade. If a page looks like it is promising something we cannot support, that is a mistake and worth reporting.