Switchboard
One public number and nobody transferring calls all day.
In a thirty-person company there is usually one person a quarter of whose job goes on transferring calls. It is not a role, it is a habit left over from a switchboard bought ten years ago. This page describes what can be replaced today and, just as importantly, what cannot.
One public number answers, asks what it can help with, and sends the call to the right person, team or extension with the context gathered. What is proven end to end today is the Twilio route; our own PBX objects exist but have moved no real audio.
What it replaces, concretely
This is not about removing the receptionist from the company, it is about giving them something to do other than pressing buttons for eight hours a day.
Manual transfers
The caller says who they want or what they need, and the call goes straight there.
The keypad menu
Replaced with an open question, which also covers the cases that never had a key.
The repeated questions
Hours, address, how to get there, who handles what. From your documents.
Filtering
Unsolicited sales calls, recognised and handled however you decide.
Covering the gaps
Lunch, leave, and the hours when the person on the phone is not there.
From one number to the right destination
The flow is short and ends, in most cases, in a transfer. The assistant job is to make the transfer correct, not to replace the person at the end of it.
- 01 Answer and ask once The company name and an open question. No option list and no hold music.
- 02 Find the person or team From a list you maintain as a document, or from a tool that returns who handles what.
- 03 Answer directly what it can Hours, address and public questions are settled in the call, without disturbing anybody.
- 04 Transfer with context Blind or consultative, your choice, with what it learned carried across.
- 05 Take over when nobody answers If the destination does not pick up, the call returns to the assistant, which records the request rather than losing it.
What a transfer leaves behind
A successful transfer leaves more than a connection: it leaves data about where the company time actually goes.
| The destination | Who received the call, as structured output, so it can be counted month by month. |
|---|---|
| The context carried | In the form configured on the route, from the whole dialogue down to a summary. |
| The undelivered calls | The ones nobody answered, recorded as a request rather than lost. |
| On the call record | The transcript, the ended reason and the transfer outcome. |
What is not finished in our own PBX
This is the page on the site where it would be easiest to promise a complete switchboard. We do not have one, and what follows is the real state.
- Exactly one path is proven A number bought or imported through Twilio, routed to an assistant. Of the nine carrier ids in the enum, only Twilio has buying and importing that actually work.
- Inbound SIP trunking does not reach the assistant The objects exist and look finished. An inbound call on a SIP trunk does not yet reach an assistant in this build.
- Numbers cannot be ported Porting does not exist in the product at all, not even as a request.
- Extensions and ring groups have moved no real audio They are written and tested, including against protocol scenarios, but no real audio has passed through our PBX in this build.
- The transfer destination is free text It is not a picker of real queues, which means a typing mistake is a routing mistake.
What businesses ask us
Can I move my existing switchboard onto CallAgent?
Today, not completely, and we would rather say so than sell a migration that stalls. What works end to end is a Twilio number routed to an assistant, with transfers to external numbers. The rest of the switchboard objects exist but have moved no real audio. The phone-numbers page states exactly what is missing.
Can I keep my current number?
Not by porting, because porting does not exist in the product. What works practically is forwarding your existing number to a new one, which does work, but means you keep the old subscription as well.
What happens if the person they wanted does not answer?
The call returns to the assistant, which takes the request and writes it down. That is in fact the most valuable part of this pattern, because that is exactly where calls are lost on an ordinary switchboard.
How does the cost compare with a classic switchboard?
It is structurally different: you do not pay per extension or per licence, you pay for the phone number plus the seconds spoken, with a 0.10 euro per minute platform margin. For a company with many extensions and few calls the arithmetic can go either way, and the pricing page shows what it is made of.
Where to go next
Telephony
Numbers, trunks, dial plan, queues, operators and campaigns, in one system.
Phone numbers
Twilio works today. Your own SIP trunk has the code and the switch, but no carrier yet.
Phone number
Telephony account, number, routing. Or your own SIP trunk.
Pricing
Components at their published price, the platform on top, and what we cannot price yet.
Notes
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1
The tools named on this page are the ones in
App\Services\Integrations\ConnectorRegistrycarryingimplemented. Anything that is only in the catalogue, without that flag, is not named here as though it worked. - 2 The real state of our own PBX, of SIP trunking and of porting is written on the phone-numbers page. Of the nine carrier ids in the enum, only Twilio has working buying and importing.