Does it transfer to a human?
- The short answer
- GreetKeeper transfers to your team when a caller asks for a person or when a rule you set fires. The important distinction is who they reach: the transfer goes to your people, on the numbers you give it, not to a room of agents we employ. Services like Ruby and Smith.ai work the other way round, and if a trained human backstop matters more to you than price, that is a real reason to prefer them.
The longer answer
Transfers are triggered three ways. The caller asks. The topic matches a rule you wrote. Or the assistant runs out of answers and your fallback says transfer.
Where the call lands is up to you. A mobile, a desk phone, a different number by time of day, or a different person by topic.
Outside opening hours the sensible rule is usually different. Most businesses transfer only genuine emergencies at 2am and take messages for everything else.
Warm, cold, and what to use when
A cold transfer dumps the caller onto the next line with no context. Whoever answers starts from nothing, and the caller repeats themselves.
A warm transfer passes the context along: who is calling, and what they have already said. Your colleague picks up already knowing the name and the problem.
Warm costs a few seconds. For a plumbing emergency or an anxious new patient, those seconds buy a much better call. For a simple "put me through to accounts", cold is fine.
There is a hybrid worth knowing about. Send the transcript by text to the person taking the call as it connects, so they read the context while saying hello.
Three rules at a property management office
Say you manage 140 rental units from a four-person office. You write three transfer rules. Anything involving water, gas, smoke or a lockout goes to the on-call maintenance mobile. Prospective renters go to the leasing desk between 9 and 5. Vendors chasing an invoice get a message taken, because nobody needs to be pulled off a showing for that.
On Tuesday at 3:20pm a tenant calls to say water is coming through her bathroom ceiling. The assistant takes her unit number and name, tells her it's putting her through to maintenance, and the on-call tech's phone rings with her details attached. Ten minutes later a man asks about the two-bedroom on Alder Street and lands at the leasing desk. At 4:05 a paving contractor asks for accounts payable, leaves his invoice number, and the bookkeeper finds the message and transcript waiting for her.
Three calls, three different outcomes, and the only person interrupted was the one who needed to be.
Check the phone on the receiving end
Most transfer problems live on the destination phone, so test each target before you trust it. Start with loops. If your main line forwards unanswered calls to GreetKeeper and your transfer rule points back at that same main line, an unanswered transfer can circle. Send transfers to a direct line or a mobile instead.
Personal voicemail is the second trap. When a mobile's own voicemail picks up after 20 seconds or so, the phone network treats the call as answered, and your tenant ends up leaving a message in somebody's personal mailbox. Shorten or switch off voicemail on any phone that receives transfers, then place a test call and let it ring out to see what really happens.
Night settings matter for the on-call phone. Do-not-disturb will silence a 2am transfer unless the incoming number is on the allowed list. Add it, and run one deliberate test call after hours. You'll learn more from that single test than from reading the settings page twice.
How GreetKeeper handles it
Transfers are on every GreetKeeper plan, including Starter at $49. Rosie gates live transfer to its $149 tier, which changes what the two entry prices actually compare.
You set the destination per rule, so emergency calls can reach the on-call mobile while billing questions reach the office line.
If the transfer rings out, the caller comes back to the assistant and it takes a message rather than dropping them.
Transfer questions
Can it transfer to different people by topic?
Yes. Route by what the caller needs: new inquiries to sales, existing jobs to the office, anything you have marked urgent to the on-call phone.
Does a transferred call still cost me?
The call was answered, so it counts against your allowance the same as any other. It does not count twice for being transferred.
Can it transfer to a mobile?
Yes, and that is the usual setup for after-hours work. The person on call gets the transfer wherever they are, with the caller's details already in hand.
Hear it take one of your calls
Two minutes, your own scenario, no card.