Your Fallback Number — What Happens If Allison Can't Answer

Your agent answers calls through a real-time voice pipeline, and like any technology it can have a rare bad moment. The fallback number exists so a technical issue on our side never means a lost customer for you.

What the fallback number is

A regular phone number (your cell, your front desk, an answering line) that we connect callers to when your agent can't take the call. You set it once during onboarding in the Business Basics step, or any time in Dashboard → Settings.

When it's used

Two situations, both rare:

• Your agent can't start or continue a call. The voice pipeline hits a technical issue (for example, a brief outage at one of our speech providers). The caller hears a short message asking them to hold, then rings through to your fallback number.
• A short spike in call volume. If concurrent calls briefly exceed capacity, overflow callers are connected to your fallback number rather than turned away.

Normal call handling is not affected by the fallback number. Transfers your agent makes on purpose are controlled by your team settings and escalation rules, not this number.

What the caller experiences

1. A brief, friendly message ("I'm having a technical issue right now. Please hold for just a moment while I connect you to a team member.")
2. Their call rings your fallback number, with the caller's real number showing on caller ID.
3. If nobody answers within about 25 seconds, they hear an apology asking them to call back in a few minutes.

If no fallback number is set, callers in this situation hear the apology directly. That is the one configuration gap worth closing today: with a fallback set, a technical hiccup becomes a normal phone call; without one, it becomes a missed customer.

You always get an email

Whenever this safety net activates, everyone on your Calls notification list gets an email within moments. It tells you who called and what happened next:

• Connected to your fallback number
• Fallback number didn't answer
• No fallback number set, so the caller heard the apology

Either way you have the caller's number and can follow up immediately.

Minutes and billing

Time a caller spends connected to your fallback number after a technical issue is not billed as agent minutes. Your invoice reflects time with your agent, matched to your call log.

Two layers of protection

There are actually two independent safety nets, and both use the same fallback number:

• If the call-handling service itself is unreachable, our phone carrier layer dials your fallback number directly.
• If the service is up but the voice pipeline fails, the service connects the caller to your fallback number as described above.

You don't configure these separately. One fallback number covers both.