The phone stopsbeing your job
You have carried the business phone for years. This is what it looks like to put it down.
This is for you if
- The phone interrupts everything and you want that to stop, not to shift it two hours later.
- Callers reach you at hours you have never advertised and you would rather they were looked after than turned away.
- You are one person, or three, and there is no reception desk to grow into.
- You want the same greeting at three in the morning as at three in the afternoon.
- You are shutting for two weeks and the phone still has to be answered.
This is not for you if
You still want to answer your own phone during the day. Plenty of people do, and they should. Knowing your regulars by voice is worth something and no service replaces it.
If that is you, hand over the evenings and the weekend and keep your daytime as it is. That is a smaller job and it is the one on the after hours page.
Round the clock is for the owner who has decided the phone is no longer theirs to carry.
What round the clock actually means
No shift, so no handover
Nothing is waiting to be passed to the next person at midnight. The three o'clock call is written up and sent at three o'clock.
No queue and no hold music
Six people can ring in the same minute and all six are answered. Volume does not make anybody wait.
Public holidays are ordinary days
Christmas Day, Waitangi Day, Easter Monday, your regional anniversary. Nothing has to be arranged and nothing costs extra for the date.
Bookings happen at any hour
A caller at 2am can be given a real time next Tuesday, because it is reading the real diary, not a list of times somebody guessed at.
You are still reachable when it matters
Handing the phone over does not mean going dark. You decide which calls are worth waking you, and only those ones do.
Thursday, your diary
- Free
- Already on a job
- Booked from the 2:14 am call
- Free
- Free
What it will not do. It answers, decides, books and writes it down. It does not give clinical or legal advice, take a card number over the phone, or make a promise about a price it has not been given. When something is outside its brief it says so and gets it to a person.
Answered at three. On your desk by seven.
It plugs into the things you already use every day. A call answered overnight is worth nothing if nobody can act on it in the morning, so the job goes where you will find it.
Google Calendar
Bookings go into the real diary at any hour, in a slot that is genuinely free.
HubSpot and GoHighLevel
Enquiries land in your CRM with the caller's number already attached.
Xero
Account questions answered from your own ledger, without anyone looking it up.
Slack and Microsoft Teams
Every call posted into the channel your team already watches.
Trello
A card per job, on the board your crew works off in the morning.
Zapier, webhooks and the REST API
Send a call anywhere else you run, or build against it yourself.
And more. Running something else? Tell us what you use and we will quote the integration work.
Several people sharing the nights? The on-call roster add-on chases whoever is on until somebody accepts. Ask us to configure the roster, escalation order and fallback for your team. How on-call works.
Round the clock, questions and answers
How much does 24/7 call answering cost?
Pay as you go is NZ$10 a month for the number plus NZ$1 a minute. The monthly business plan is NZ$129 for your first three months, then NZ$199, with 200 minutes and 50 texts included. Covering nights, weekends and public holidays does not add a surcharge.
What is the difference between after hours and 24/7 call answering?
After hours means the phone comes back to you in the morning. Round the clock means it never does. The mechanics are the same and the only thing that changes is where you draw your own hours, so you can start with one and move to the other.
Will callers know it is not a person?
Most do not think about it and some do. If a caller asks, it tells them straight away that it is an assistant. It never claims to be you or to be a named staff member.
What happens if two people ring at once?
Both are answered. There is no single line to be busy and no second caller listening to hold music. That is usually the reason people move off a human bureau at peak times.
Can I still take some calls myself?
Yes. You can name the numbers that always come through to you, so a regular customer or the person you subcontract to rings your mobile and everyone else is answered.
What happens on public holidays?
Nothing changes. Public holidays are answered like any other day, and if you are closed the caller is told when you open again rather than being left with a dead line.
Hand the phone over
Tell us your number and roughly how busy the line is. We will ring you back, write the rules with you and put it live on your own number.
Your account opens as soon as you are ready. Your agent is deployed and trained within 24 hours.
We use what you send here to answer your enquiry and nothing else. What we do with your details.
Read next
Hand the phone over for good
Keep your number. Every hour answered, booked and written down. Live on your own line the next day.