Skip to content

Getting a person

The worst thing an assistant can do is refuse to fetch you.

Everyone has been trapped by one. You ask for a person, it offers you the menu again, and by the third loop you are not a customer any more, you are an enemy.

Why this is the objection that kills the sale

When somebody hesitates about an assistant answering their phone, this is almost always what they mean. Not that it will be rude, and not that it will get an address wrong. That it will stand between their customer and them, and refuse to move.

The complaint is always the same shape. The caller asks for a manager. The system offers to take a message. The caller asks again. It offers voicemail. Nobody rings back. A customer who would have been annoyed for thirty seconds is now telling people about it.

That failure is not caused by the assistant being stupid. It is caused by nobody building the door.

What happens when somebody asks for a person

Six steps, and the fourth is the one that makes it a handover rather than a cold transfer.

  1. 1

    It notices

    Asking for a person is one of the things it listens for, alongside a caller who is plainly annoyed. It does not need the magic word.

  2. 2

    It checks you take transfers

    Transfers are set up per business, to the number you choose. If you have not set one, it does not pretend it can.

  3. 3

    It rings you

    The caller stays on the line rather than being hung up on and asked to try again.

  4. 4

    It whispers to you first

    Before you are connected, it tells you who is holding and what they want. You pick up already knowing, instead of saying hello to a stranger mid-sentence.

  5. 5

    You are joined to the call

    One conversation, continued. The customer does not repeat themselves.

  6. 6

    If you do not pick up, it comes back

    The call does not die in a failed transfer. It returns to the assistant, which takes the details and emails them to you.

The whisper is the whole difference

A cold transfer drops you into a conversation already in progress. You say hello, the customer says the thing they have already said once, and the first twenty seconds are spent catching up. Everyone has been on both ends of that.

The whisper is a private line to you before the two calls are joined: who it is, and what they are ringing about. It takes a second or two and it is the reason the handover feels like being fetched by a receptionist rather than passed to a queue.

It also gives you the option to not take it. You know what the call is before you commit to it, which is not something a cold transfer offers.

What happens when the transfer fails

You are on a roof, or driving, or asleep. The transfer rings and nothing happens.

The call comes back to the assistant rather than dropping. It picks the conversation up, takes what it needs, and emails you the details, so a failed transfer degrades into a captured lead rather than into a hang-up.

This is the part that is easy to leave out and expensive to leave out. A transfer that only works when you are free is a feature that fails precisely on the days you most needed it.

When it deliberately does not transfer

It does not put every caller through, because that would make it a very slow way of ringing your mobile. Somebody asking your opening hours gets an answer, not a transfer.

It also will not transfer to a number you have not set. If you have not given it somewhere to send people, it says a person will get back to them and emails you, rather than inventing an option that does not exist.

And it says up front that it is an assistant. The point is not to fool anyone into thinking they reached a person — it is that asking for one actually works.

Where being able to reach a person matters most

Questions on this

Does the customer have to say a magic phrase?

No. Asking for a person is one of the things it listens for, and so is a caller who has plainly had enough. It errs towards fetching you rather than towards keeping the conversation.

What if I do not want to be interrupted?

Then do not answer, and it handles it. The call returns to the assistant, which takes the details and emails you. Transfers are also configured per business, so you decide the number and whether it is on at all.

Will I know who it is before I pick up?

Yes. That is what the whisper is for — you hear who is holding and what they want before the two calls are joined, so you are never dropped into the middle of something.

Does it pretend to be a person?

No, and it says so at the start of the call. Pretending gets found out on call two. The point is that asking for a human actually gets you one, not that nobody notices.

Not sure this is the one that fits? How it works walks the whole thing end to end.

The other three

15 minutes. Bring your call log.

We'll count what you actually missed last month and tell you what it cost. If it's not worth fixing, we'll say so.

Book a call

Or go break the demo first. It costs you nothing to test.