Who answers calls first: your team or the assistant

You decide who picks up first during office hours: your team, with the assistant as backup, or the assistant, which passes the call to your team when the caller asks. Outside office hours the assistant always answers.

Change the setting

1. Go to Assistants and click Configure on your phone assistant.
2. Open Hours & answering.
3. Under Who answers first?, pick one:
   • The team: rings the team first. If nobody answers, the assistant picks up.
   • The assistant: answers right away and passes to the team only if the caller asks.

The choice saves on its own and applies to the next call.

When the team answers first

• During office hours, incoming calls ring your team's number.
• Your team has about 25 seconds to pick up. If nobody answers, the line is busy or the number can't be reached, the assistant takes the call and helps the caller as usual.
• If the call reaches a voicemail, the assistant comes back on the line instead of leaving the caller on the recording.
• When your team picks up, the assistant isn't part of the call, so there's no transcript, summary or tags for it.

You need a team number for this option. Without one, The team is disabled and you'll see "For the team to answer first, add a team number below." See Transfer calls to your team.

When the assistant answers first

• The assistant greets every caller and answers questions, opens tickets and so on.
• If the caller asks for a person ("I want to talk to someone", "transfer me"), the assistant transfers the call right away, as long as it's within office hours and you have a team number.
• If there's no team number, the assistant never offers a transfer; it offers a ticket when that's set up.

Which one should I choose?

• The team if you have people free to answer most calls and you want the assistant to catch the ones they miss.
• The assistant if most questions are routine (hours, prices, how-tos) and you want your team to only get the calls that need them.

See how it's working

• On the Assistants page, the card shows Answers first: The team or The assistant.
• In Calls, the Who answered chip shows Team or AI for each call, and the Answered by filter lets you list them. See Call statuses explained.

Good to know

• Outside office hours the assistant answers regardless of this setting. See Office hours.
• If no office hours are set, the assistant answers every call.
• WhatsApp has its own setting with the same name. See Who answers first on WhatsApp.
• If the option is greyed out with "Call transfer is not available", your assistant only receives calls from your website, so it can't ring a phone number. Contact us to enable it.