Your phone rings while you're with a customer. Somebody should answer it.
It picks up on the first ring, at two in the afternoon or ten at night. It knows what you charge, where you go and what you don't do. It answers the questions your customers ask every week — and when someone's ready, it puts them on your calendar while they're still on the phone.
After every call, you get a text. It gives you the details on the conversation and what's now on your calendar.
Why it matters
Voicemail was built for a time when callers waited. They don't now. They hang up and try the next number — and the job goes to whoever picks up.
The busiest hours for your phone are the hours you can't answer it.
Fewer than 3 in 100 callers sent to voicemail leave a message. The rest just hang up.
In one study of home-service businesses, more than one call in four went unanswered.
In a second study, 62% of calls to small businesses went unanswered when researchers called them.
Sources: Invoca call data (first two) · 411 Locals small-business call study, 2016 (third). Whether you run a service company or a professional practice, a caller who reaches voicemail acts the same way: they hang up and try the next name.
A person at your desk covers the business day. The receptionist covers nights, weekends, lunch breaks and sick days — the calls that used to go to voicemail and sit there.
Try it before you talk to anybody
Two made-up businesses, both answered by the same virtual receptionist we build for clients. Pick the one closest to yours and call it. No form, no salesperson, about ninety seconds.
Both will tell you they are a demonstration line. They answer on the first ring, any hour.
What to listen for: how quickly it answers, whether it sounds like your business, whether it books the time or just takes a message, and what it does when it doesn’t know. At the end it asks your name and what kind of business you run, so we can follow up. Nothing else.
What a
A virtual receptionist is a trained voice that answers your business line, holds a real back-and-forth with the caller, and acts on what it hears — checking your calendar, booking the appointment, taking a message, or passing the call to you when it should.
It isn't a recording, and it isn't a menu. The difference between an answering machine and a receptionist comes down to what the caller has at the end of the call.
Where it sits, and
The receptionist isn't a standalone gadget bolted onto your phone. It's one link in a chain, and it's the link that starts the rest of it moving.
One call sets off six things. You do none of them.
The number your customers already have. Nothing about it changes for them.
First ring, any hour. Questions about price, area and availability answered from what you told us.
Real availability, your working hours, and the rules you set — not a guess it has to walk back.
Confirmed on the call, with a confirmation text to the customer straight after.
A text to you with who called, what they wanted, and what's now on your day.
A reminder before the appointment. A text offering a new time if they cancel or don't show. A review request after it. All without you.
If the caller isn't ready to book, they don't fall out of the chain — follow-up picks them up and keeps going for the next two weeks.
One receptionist,
Scheduled and Known give your receptionist three places to work: the phone, your texts, and the chat window on your own website. Same prices, same hours, same rules, booking into the same calendar.
You approve how each one sounds before it ever goes live.
Any hour, in your business’s name. It answers the usual questions, takes the details and books the job on the call.
A customer texts, it replies. It answers questions, quotes your prices and books the appointment right in the conversation.
Visitors ask a question and get an answer, and a visitor at midnight becomes a booking by morning.
Text and chat replies use your plan’s text allowance: 4,000 texts a month on Scheduled and 8,000 on Known. Extra texts bill automatically at $20 per 1,000.
Worth saying out loud
Most of what goes wrong with phone answering is somebody being sold more than it does. So here's the honest edge of it.
It answers as your business and it doesn't claim to be a person. Callers who want you get told they'll hear from you, and you get told immediately.
It gives the prices you've told it to give, in the situations you've told it to give them. Anything outside that, it takes down and hands to you.
It's built to recognize when a call has stopped being about booking, and to get it to a human — you, or whoever you nominate — instead of pushing through a script.
Everything it knows comes out of your setup call. That's why the setup call exists, and why the ones we do are longer than anybody else's.
It's included in
Answered keeps nothing from falling through — every missed call gets a text back in seconds. It just doesn't pick the phone up.
Picking the phone up starts at Scheduled.
For solo owners and small practices that want every call accounted for, without adding a thing to their day.
No voice receptionist on this plan. Every missed call gets a text back in seconds, and the conversation carries on there.
For established businesses that want the phone covered and the calendar filled around the clock.
Your receptionist picks up 24/7, answers the usual questions and books the job, in your business's name.
For businesses ready to grow their visibility, their reputation and their repeat work.
The same receptionists, with more room to talk and our team keeping what they know current.
The things people ask
If yours isn't here, ask it on the call. We'd rather answer it now than have you find out in month two.
Some will, some won't, and we don't build it to fool anybody. It answers in your business's name, it's polite, and it gets to the point — which is usually more than a caller expects at eight at night.
What they notice is that somebody picked up.
It says so, takes the details, and gets it to you — by text straight away if it's urgent by your rules, in your inbox if it isn't. It doesn't invent an answer and it doesn't leave the caller in a loop.
Yes, and most owners do. It picks up what you don't — after hours, while you're on a job, when you're already on another call. You decide which of those it covers.
Receptionist minutes are the time the virtual receptionist spends actually talking to callers. Calls you or your staff take yourselves are regular phone calls, billed separately at 3¢ a minute. Scheduled includes 300 a month, which for most businesses is more than a normal month uses.
After that it's $0.35 a minute, charged to your account automatically, with a receipt each time, and nothing stops working. Going over usually means it's booking work, which is a good reason to look at Known.
From your setup call. Your prices, your service area, your hours, what you don't do, and the questions you get every week. It takes about an hour of your time, once — then we build from it and you approve how it sounds before it ever answers a real call.
You already know
Fifteen minutes on the phone and we'll tell you honestly whether the receptionist is the part you need — or whether the missed-call text-back in Answered already covers you.
Your phone is covered 24/7. We're on your side.
Everything in every plan
Every plan is built from the same pieces. Here they are in four groups, with the plan each one starts in. Tap one to see how it works.
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