Can it route calls by who is calling?

Number-based routing has genuine uses. A known problem customer, a VIP account, a supplier who always needs the same person.

It degrades quickly in practice. People ring from a mobile one day and the office the next, and the table never quite matches reality.

Withheld numbers defeat it entirely, and those are a meaningful share of inbound calls for most businesses.

The assistant answers first, asks what the caller needs, and captures it as text. That is a better routing signal than a number.

It also works for callers you have never spoken to, which is most of the inquiries you actually want.

A menu is the older version of this and a worse one, because people pick the option that sounds closest rather than the one that fits.

Where number-based rules genuinely help, they tend to be few and specific. Three important numbers is maintainable; three hundred is a table nobody updates.

Where you run several lines, each number can have its own hours, greeting and calendar under one account. A branch line and an ad line can follow different rules without a second login.

Say you run a heating and cooling company with a commercial division and a residential one. Three calls come in on a Wednesday.

The first caller says, "I'm the facilities manager at Lakeside Mall, and rooftop unit four is down." He's phoning from his personal cell, which isn't in anyone's table. Because the assistant asked what he needed, the call goes to the commercial service desk with the unit number already noted.

The second says her air conditioning is blowing warm. Her call comes from her employer's main line, a number shared by 200 people, and she's routed to residential dispatch on the strength of what she said.

The third is a parts supplier calling about a back-ordered compressor, from a call center number that changes weekly. A message goes to purchasing and nobody's afternoon is interrupted.

A number-based table would have recognized none of them.

A few callers are worth recognizing by number, and the list should fit on a sticky note. Your largest account's main line is one. The alarm monitoring company that calls about your own building is another, and perhaps the owner's family. If your phone system can send specific caller IDs straight to a person before any forwarding happens, set those up there and leave everything else to the conversation.

Treat caller ID as a hint and never as proof. Numbers can be spoofed with little effort. A call that appears to come from a customer's number shouldn't, on that basis alone, get account details, a changed appointment or a gate code. Identity needs a question only the real customer can answer, asked by whoever takes the call.

Review the list every quarter. People change jobs and companies change carriers, and a rule for a number that now belongs to a stranger is worse than having none.

If recognizing existing customers matters to you, the question is whether the assistant can read your customer records. Bring that to a demo with the name of your system, and ask to see it working.

GreetKeeper works out what the caller needs from the conversation rather than from a key press or a lookup table.

That reason lands in the summary, so whoever takes the transfer already knows why the phone rang.

The caller's number is captured too, so you can still call back from a business line rather than a personal one.