What is call routing?

Every phone setup routes, even if the rule is simply that everything rings one handset.

The useful rules are about the caller rather than about your org chart. What they need, how urgent it is, whether they are new.

Time is the second axis and the one most small businesses under-use. Out of hours should route differently from Tuesday at eleven, and holidays differently again.

Here's what a full rule set can look like for a hypothetical heating and cooling company with six staff. Rule one: no heat or no cooling, at any hour, goes to the on-call tech's cell. The second rule covers anyone asking for a new-system quote. They go to Jen in sales between 8 and 5, and they're offered an estimate slot outside those hours.

Third, questions about an existing appointment get answered from the calendar, and anything that needs changing goes to dispatch as a message. Vendors and sales reps, under rule four, get a polite message taken and are never transferred. Everything else falls to rule five and becomes a message with a summary, which the office reads at 8 am.

That's the whole thing. It fits on an index card, and anyone in the company could tell you where a given call will land. If your own list runs past one card, that's usually a sign two rules are doing the same job.

Write ten caller sentences on paper, including a few awkward ones. One might be "my AC is making a grinding noise but it's still cooling", which is urgent or not depending on who you ask. Another is a landlord whose tenant says the furnace is out. A third caller has a question about last week's quote. Next to each one, write where you think it should go before you test anything.

Then call your own line and say them. When the call lands somewhere you didn't predict, there are two possible causes. Either the rule's wording is too loose, or you and your office manager never agreed on the answer. That second cause is more common than people expect, and it's cheaper to find out over ten fake calls than during the first hot week of July.

GreetKeeper routes on what the caller says, so an emergency reaches the on-call mobile while a billing question reaches the office line.

Rules stack with time, so the same request can route one way at noon and another at midnight without you maintaining two systems.

Where a routing rule fires, the transcript records it alongside the conversation, which is how you check the rules are catching what you meant.