Between the ring and the answer.

The number

Somebody dials.

The call arrives with a signature, and we verify it before anything else happens — including before we know whose call it is. Then we look up which of your numbers was dialled, because each one can behave differently: a main line, a direct line that rings one person, or a line that hands the whole call to a flow.

The flow

Your call flow runs.

If the number is bound to a flow, the flow gets the entire call and decides everything from there — including whether you are open. It is our own interpreter rather than a menu builder bolted onto someone else's: 28 block types, and because a phone call is a series of separate web requests rather than one long-running program, it is a resumable state machine that picks up exactly where the caller left off.

The version is pinned when the call starts. Publish a change mid-call and the person already listening finishes on the version they began with.

Hours

Are you open?

A business-hours block reads one of your saved schedules in its own timezone, daylight saving handled for you, and it runs before a task exists. That ordering is the point: a caller at nine in the evening should hear your closed message straight away, not wait in a queue that nobody is watching until it times out.

It branches four ways — open, a holiday, an emergency, or simply closed — and you decide what each one does. A holiday can name itself. And if something goes wrong today, one switch on the schedule puts every flow that uses it down the emergency branch, with no publish and no edit to your hours.

The queue

It picks a queue.

Queues are named — Sales, Support, Billing — and each has a priority and an optional required skill. An agent is only offered a call from a queue they belong to and have the skills for, so a caller who pressed 2 for French does not land on somebody who does not speak it.

Waiting

While they wait.

A queue can have its own in-queue flow: hold music, an estimated wait, an offer to call them back instead. This runs on a separate executor because the phone network only permits a narrow set of instructions inside a waiting document, and quietly ignores anything else. Publishing checks that for you rather than letting a caller hear silence where a message should be.

Answer

Somebody picks up.

The moment an agent answers, the call is bridged into a conference. That is what makes every control work the same way afterwards: hold, blind transfer, consult transfer where you stay on to introduce the caller, merging all three of you together, muting or removing anyone, and recording.

The agent can be in a browser tab or in the Windows desktop app. It is the same call either way.

After

And it gets written down.

A call record closes with who was on it, how long it ran and how long they waited. It attaches to a contact by number, so the next time that person rings, whoever answers already has the history in front of them. Usage is metered as the call happens rather than totted up at month end — which is the only reason the spend ceiling can stop anything.