What takes effect when
Changes on Who picks up take effect on your next call. Changes to a journey go live when you publish.
The reasoning is that a phone number is something you maintain — people join, leave and change phone, and you fix a wrong mobile in a hurry — while a journey is something you design, review and publish. So there’s no draft here and nothing to publish: each panel says Takes effect on your next call as you work, and a team saves as you change it.
Because the list is live, it is also the one place in the editor that can tell you no. A change that would leave a live journey with nobody to ring is refused at the moment you try it, rather than breaking a call later.
The two ways a caller reaches somebody
Both start on the Journeys tab, as an action on a step. In the action list they sit together under Putting callers through:- Put the caller through to whoever they ask for — your agent listens for a name, finds that person in People, checks it has the right one, and rings them. There’s nothing to choose on the step, because it searches everybody on your list.
- Put the caller through to a team you choose — the step names one of your Teams, and the call rings that team’s numbers in order until somebody picks up.
People: who callers can ask for by name
The People tab is a table of names and numbers, with three columns: Name, Phone and Can we ring it?. Search the list at the top; longer lists are paged.1
Click Add a person
A row opens at the top of the list with two fields: their name, and their phone number.
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Type their name and number
The number field shows a country flag and dialling code, so you can type the number the way you’d write it at home. Give people the name a caller would actually say — the name is what your agent listens for.
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Click Save
The row joins the list and takes effect on the next call. To change somebody later, click the pencil on their row, edit the same two fields, and click Update. Cancel closes a row without saving it.
What “Can we ring it?” is telling you
Every row is checked against the numbers we’re able to dial, and the verdict sits in its own column.
Click Fix this number on the row and it opens ready to correct, so you never have to work out which field to click.
A number you type here is checked as you save it: if we can’t ring it, the row isn’t saved at all and tells you why on the spot. Numbers that arrive from a spreadsheet behave differently — they’re saved and flagged, so nobody is lost over one bad cell — which is why rows with a verdict on them exist at all.
A dot appears on the People tab whenever somebody needs attention, so you can see it from the Teams tab. Click Only needing attention to filter the list down to those rows.
Switching somebody off, and removing them
When somebody is on holiday, on leave or off sick, use the switch on their row rather than deleting them. Their row greys out, the chip reads Away — not taking calls, and callers who ask for them are told they aren’t available and offered a message. Flick the switch back when they return and everything is as it was. The switch also reaches into your teams. If they’re in any, you’re asked to confirm first — “Priya is in 2 of your teams. Switching them off here also takes them out of Sales and Out of hours until you switch them back on.” Their place in each dial order is kept, so nothing has to be rebuilt. Removing somebody does the opposite, and the confirmation spells it out: callers can no longer ask for them by name, but each team they’re in keeps the number it already holds and goes on ringing it. The confirmation names those teams and the number each one keeps. To take somebody out of a team as well, edit the team.Teams: numbers rung one after another
A team is a name and an ordered list of phones — your sales line, an on-call rota, a reception desk. Its columns are Name, Who it rings and Can we ring them?, and each row shows the order in full (1 · Priya → 2 · Sam → 3 · Reception), the journeys that ring the team, and what the order means for a caller.
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Click Add a team
A panel opens inside the table. Give it a name — Sales, Out of hours — in the Name field.
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Add who it rings
Choose from your people picks somebody off your People list. Type a name and number adds a phone that isn’t a person on the list — a reception desk, an out-of-hours line, a contractor. Either way, every entry carries a name, so the order reads as “Priya, then Sam, then reception” rather than three numbers.
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Put them in the order you want them rung
The arrows on each entry move it up and down. Position 1 is rung first and gets the caller soonest. The × takes an entry out.
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Click Add team
From then on the panel saves as you change it — add somebody, reorder, rename — and each change takes effect on the next call. Done just closes the panel.
What your caller hears
While you’re building or editing a team, a line called What your caller hears keeps count: “We ring these one after another until somebody picks up. About 20 seconds each — a caller waits up to two minutes, then your agent takes a message.” It counts numbers rather than entries, and it skips anybody who can’t be rung right now, so it always describes the real wait. That’s the honest cost of a long dial order: the eleventh person in a team is several minutes of ringing away, and this is where you see it before a caller does.Entries that follow a person, and entries that don’t
An entry added with Choose from your people is marked linked to your people. It follows that person: their number, and their away switch. That’s what makes one switch do two jobs — switching Priya off for two weeks stops callers being offered her by name and makes her teams ring straight past her, with her position kept for when she’s back. A linked entry has no number of its own to correct, so it offers Change on People › instead of a pencil. Correcting it there fixes it everywhere at once: the by-name search and every team she’s in. An entry you typed in holds its own number. Nothing else on the tab changes it, and changing it here affects nothing else. If an entry that used to follow somebody no longer does — because they were removed, or replaced by an import — it’s marked no longer linked and carries on ringing the number it stored. Nothing is broken; the chip is there so the drift doesn’t go unnoticed. The same person can appear in a team more than once, and that’s deliberate: try my mobile, then the office, then my mobile again is a perfectly good order. Anyone already in the team still appears in the picker, with a note of how many times they’re in it, rather than being hidden. Somebody whose number can’t be rung is greyed out there and can’t be added until their number is fixed on People.What a team’s verdict means
The Can we ring them? column reads Ready, All 3 ready or 2 of 3 ready while there’s somebody to dial — a team with an away colleague or one bad number still works, it just rings fewer phones. Nobody to ring means a caller who reaches this team goes straight to a message. When one bad number is the cause, the row names it and offers the fix — Fix this number for an entry holding its own number, Fix it on People › for a linked one. Switched off means somebody has used the team’s switch; a switched-off team rings nobody, however healthy its entries, which is what makes it useful for a team you only want in service at certain times of year.Filling the list from a spreadsheet
If you already keep your staff numbers in a spreadsheet, you can load the whole list in one go from the People tab. Take a copy first: Export downloads your current list as a spreadsheet in exactly the shape the import accepts, which is the only way back if an import removes somebody you wanted.1
Click Import from a file
The panel opens where the rows were, with the template beside the drop zone.
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Start from the template
Download the template gives you two columns and nothing else: Name and Phone number. Your own file works too, as long as it has those two headings. Numbers work either way round,
+442079460018 or 02079460018 — but format the phone column as Text first, or your spreadsheet rounds long numbers into something we can’t read.3
Drop the file in, or choose it
A spreadsheet or a CSV file, either dragged onto the panel or picked with Choose a file. Nothing is saved yet — you get a preview of exactly what the file would do.
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Read the preview from the top
It leads with what you lose: the people on your list who aren’t in your file, named one by one with their number and any team they’re in. Underneath, a count — “12 added · 130 changing · 8 removed” — and the row-by-row detail, where a changed number shows old and new. A name can be corrected in place here, so a duplicate is fixable without going back to your spreadsheet.
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Click Replace my people
Your list now matches the file, live on the next call, and the People tab confirms what changed.
When a change is refused
One rule protects your live agent: a live journey must always have somebody to ring. If a change here would leave a published step with nobody, it’s refused at the moment you try it — removing a team a live step rings, switching somebody off when they’re the last person a team can dial, correcting a number to one we can’t ring. The refusal appears in the row you were working in, with everything you typed still in place, and it gives you every reason at once rather than one at a time:- A sentence — “You can’t remove Priya Shah yet. One journey step would be left with nobody to ring — callers who get there would go straight to a message instead of reaching anybody.”
- A row for each thing in the way, naming the journey and where in it the step sits, or naming the team that would be left empty. Open › takes you straight to it.
- A line telling you what would make it possible — update that step so it rings somebody else, add somebody to that team, or switch the team off — “then come back.”
A human receptionist
The third tab, A human receptionist, covers the one hand-off that isn’t your own numbers: when your agent can’t finish a call, one of our receptionists picks it up instead of your caller leaving a message. The panel is read-only for everybody, admin or not, because this one is set up on your account by us rather than by you. It reads one of two ways:- On your account — “A person here answers on your behalf”, followed by the journeys that hand over, each with an Open › link to the step. If none do yet, it says so; plenty of agents are set up that way on purpose. To change anything about it, talk to us.
- Not on your account — “Not on your account yet”, with a line explaining what the option is and an invitation to talk to us about adding it.