One number answers. The right pocket rings.

The shape of the thing

Most business phone products are a phone system: a platform that replaces the phones your team uses, gives everyone a new identity on it, and charges for each of those identities every month. You install apps, you provision users, you administer it.

This is not that. It is one number, one menu of up to seven options, and a dashboard. Your team keeps the phones they already own, on the mobile plans they already pay for, using the dialler that came with the handset. Nobody is provisioned, because there is nothing to provision them into. A call that arrives at your business number is asked one question and then sent to a real person's existing mobile as an ordinary incoming call.

That constraint is the product. Everything below follows from it.

1. The number

You sign up in the app with your email, business name and country and sign in with the link we email you. The first question is "Which number do your customers call today?": keeping the number you already advertise is the default (see below). The other choice is a new number: a local number searched by area code (optionally with digits or letters you want in it), or a toll-free number on the 800-series codes the US and Canada share. Availability varies by area code, and big-city codes are often out of stock, so have a second choice in mind. Numbers that require a street address on file are not offered. Local usually wins for a business whose customers are local: a number in the area code where you work signals that you are nearby, which matters for trades, clinics and anything where somebody might reasonably want you to drive to them. Which area code to choose works through overlays, neighbouring markets and multiple locations. Toll-free reads as national, and costs the caller nothing from a landline, which matters less than it used to now that mobile plans bundle minutes.

If you already advertise a number, you do not have to give it up. Enter it and an instant check runs; the form then asks only what that number needs (for a US number, details from a recent bill, plus the transfer PIN for a mobile; for toll-free and Canadian numbers, only who holds the account, and our team moves those). The one signature is the transfer authorization, signed online from an email, and you follow the status in the app until the number has moved. Nothing is charged until then, and the old line keeps carrying calls for the whole time, so nothing breaks while you wait; do not cancel it until we confirm the move. The carriers set the date, and the earliest you can request is 8 days out. The rules, and why ports get rejected, are on porting your existing number.

If you have not decided what kind of number you want yet, our long-form guide to getting a business phone number compares eight option types with real pricing, and covers the identity documents and toll-free considerations that catch people out.

The business number is the only number a caller ever deals with. It is the number you put on the website, the invoice, the van and the Google Business Profile. When a call is forwarded to someone on your team, their phone shows the business number as the caller ID, not the caller's own number, so they know it is a business call.

2. The greeting

The greeting and menu can be in English, in Canadian French (with a Canadian French voice) or in US Spanish (with a Spanish voice), and one line can offer up to all three. When a line has more than one language, callers choose either first, before anything else ("For English, press 1. Para español, oprima el 2."), or with a key at the end of the menu: 7 for Spanish, 8 for French, 9 for English. Callers from Quebec area codes still start in French in that mode; multilingual menus explains the layout. A line can also skip the menu and go straight to one action, after the language choice if there is one. You type what callers should hear and the voice is generated from your text. Uploading your own recording is not offered; if a prompt needs different wording than the app gives you, our team can adjust it on request. You edit and publish the menu from the dashboard whenever you like, and the menu history lets you restore an earlier version. That matters more than it sounds: the greeting is the one piece of your business that every single caller experiences, and being able to change it in a minute means you actually will.

A workable greeting does three things in about eight seconds. It confirms the caller reached the right business, so they stop wondering. It gives them the options in the order of how often they are needed, not in the order that flatters your org chart. And it stops. The most common mistake is a greeting that explains your opening hours, your website address and your mission statement to somebody who is standing in a flooded kitchen. Our library of phone menu scripts has tested wording for six kinds of small business.

3. The routing

The menu has up to seven options, on keys 0 to 9; when callers choose their language with a key at the end of the menu, keys 7, 8 and 9 are kept for the languages they use. Each option does exactly one of three things.

Ring phones in turn. Option 3 is billing, billing is Dana, Dana's phone rings. The phone can be any US or Canadian number, mobile, landline or toll-free. An option can ring up to three phones one after another, each for 10 to 60 seconds: the employee for 20 seconds, then the owner. If nobody answers, the caller leaves a voicemail.

Take a voicemail. The caller goes straight to a message, which arrives by email. Use it for anything that can wait: billing questions, quote requests, suppliers.

Play a message and hang up. Your address, opening hours or website, read out, then the call ends. Use it for the question you answer ten times a day.

The phones can be on any US or Canadian carrier, and there is no per-person charge for the people behind the menu. There are no sub-menus. Designing the menu goes through how many options to offer, in what order, and the specific mistakes that send callers in circles.

What happens after hours

You set business hours for each day of the week, in your time zone: Eastern, Central, Mountain, Arizona, Pacific or Atlantic. The hours are spoken in the menu's language, in Spanish for example "de lunes a viernes, de 8 de la mañana a 5 de la tarde, hora del Este". Outside those hours, and all day on the holidays you add, callers hear your closed message and then either leave a voicemail or hear the message and the call ends. Calls are not forwarded to a mobile or an on-call person after hours.

This is the part that most repays five minutes of thought. An accountant wants "we are closed, leave a message, we open at nine", because nothing that arrives at 11pm is urgent, and that is exactly what the closed message does. A plumber whose 11pm calls are the profitable ones also plans night cover; an after-hours on-call plan sets out the rota, urgency rules and handoff that involves.

When nobody answers

If the call is not picked up, it takes a voicemail. The recording arrives by email as an MP3 attachment, sent to the recipients you choose, and the written transcript follows in a second email when transcription produces text. The email comes in the language the business chose (English, French or Spanish), and French and Spanish voicemails are transcribed in their own language. The dashboard lists every voicemail, where you can play it, read the transcript or delete it; voicemails are kept there for 365 days.

The transcript is the part that changes behaviour. A voicemail you have to dial in and listen to is a task; a transcript in your inbox is a message you have already read by the time you have finished looking at it, and you can forward it, search it and act on it from a phone in one hand while doing something else with the other. In practice it means missed calls stop disappearing. To put a figure on what they were costing, see the missed call cost calculator.

The dashboard

The person who signed up has a dashboard; nobody else on the team needs an account. It shows the number and its status, the voicemails, this month's calls, minutes and forwarded minutes, and the recent calls. It is also where you edit and publish the menu, look back through the menu history and restore an earlier version, and open the billing portal.

Incoming calls, on the phones you already have

The menu answers, and a real person on your team picks up. Auto Attendant routes incoming voice calls; there are no desk phones or apps to set up, and the number is for calls, not text messages. Everyone keeps calling out from their own mobile as they always have, including 911 or 9-1-1, so emergency calls work exactly as their carrier provides them; see emergency calling.

The standards underneath

None of this needs you to know a protocol, but the pieces are public and worth knowing exist, because they explain why a business number behaves the way it does.

The number. Telephone numbers follow ITU-T Recommendation E.164, the international public telecommunication numbering plan.1 In the United States, Canada and a number of other countries and territories, numbers are issued under the North American Numbering Plan, whose neutral administrator (NANPA) is the authoritative source for number assignments in the US.2 That is why an area code can be looked up rather than guessed; see area codes.

Keeping a number. In the US the rule on how fast a carrier must complete a simple port is federal: one business day for a simple wireline-to-wireline or intermodal request, four for a non-simple one.3 The details, and why ports get rejected, are on the porting page.

Internet calling. Where a call travels over the internet rather than a circuit, the signalling that sets it up is usually the Session Initiation Protocol, defined by the IETF as an application-layer protocol for creating, modifying and terminating sessions that include Internet telephone calls.4 The key a caller presses is a DTMF tone, and the IETF has a separate standard for carrying DTMF digits and other telephony tones inside RTP packets.5 You are never asked to configure either; they are named here so that a vendor who mentions them is not speaking a private language.

Caller ID. US voice providers are required to implement the STIR/SHAKEN caller ID authentication framework in their IP networks, with authentication and verification duties set out in the rule.6 It lets the network receiving a call check the caller identification the originating network attached, and it is one of the pieces behind spam labels on business numbers.

911. Federal rules for multi-line telephone systems require that a user can dial 911 directly without a prefix such as 9, and that the system notify a central location, where it can be configured to.7 Whether a given office counts as a multi-line telephone system is a matter of the definition in the rule, not of how the product is marketed, so read emergency calling before you rely on any provider's description of this.