Water is coming through a ceiling and your phone is ringing out
GreetKeeper routes urgent business calls to whoever is on call tonight, and tells anyone in danger to dial 911.
Caller
“There's water coming through the kitchen ceiling and I can't find the stopcock. Is anyone able to come out?”
What happened next
- Matched your urgent list on the words the caller used
- Transferred to the on-call mobile after taking the address
- Address and description already in the text when the tech answered
Urgent work arrives at the worst hour and rings out
Urgent calls are not spread evenly. They land at 1am, on a Sunday, on the night the one person with the rota is asleep with their phone face down.
Voicemail is useless here. Someone standing in an inch of water is not leaving a message; they are dialing the next firm on the search results while the water rises.
Diverting everything to a mobile does not work either. Your on-call tech gets woken by a caller asking about pricing, so after two weeks the phone goes on silent.
GreetKeeper answers first and sorts. Your urgent list gets a transfer with the address already captured, and everything else waits for the morning.
How an urgent call is routed
You define urgent. The system does not invent its own definition of a crisis.
Tell real emergencies to hang up
If a caller describes a fire, a gas leak, injury or a medical problem, they are told plainly to hang up and call emergency services. For those, 911 always comes first.
Match your urgent list
You write the situations that count. No heat overnight, an active leak, a locked-out tenant. The words callers actually use go in the list, not the words you use.
Take the address before transferring
Address, number and one line about the problem come first. If the transfer fails, your tech still gets a text with everything needed to call back.
Park everything else until morning
A pricing question at 1am gets an answer or a booking, not a transfer. That is what keeps your on-call phone worth answering.
What on-call cover costs
Overnight volume is low and the value per call is high, which is unusual.
| Plan | Monthly | Calls included | After that |
|---|---|---|---|
| StarterFor a single location taking calls one line at a time. | $49 | 200 | $0.45 per call |
| ProfessionalBooking, routing and transfers included, not an add-on. | $149 | 750 | $0.35 per call |
| ScaleFor busy phones and longer opening hours. | $349 | 2,000 | $0.25 per call |
Starter is $49 a month for 200 answered calls at $0.45 over. Professional is $149 for 750 at $0.35. Scale is $349 for 2,000 at $0.25.
Most overnight calls are short, because an urgent caller wants a person and gets transferred quickly. Paying per call rather than per minute keeps those cheap.
Booking is on every plan, so the non-urgent overnight caller can take a morning slot instead of being told to call back.
Setting up urgent calls safely
Write your urgent list in the words customers use, like no heat, burst pipe or water through the ceiling. Add new phrases from the first two weeks of transcripts.
Name a second fallback number, so an urgent transfer tries another person when the first phone rings out.
GreetKeeper texts the on-call person with the caller's details on every urgent call. A caller in real danger is told to hang up and dial 911.
Questions people ask
Can this replace my answering service for emergencies?
For urgent business calls, yes. It routes them to your on-call person with the detail captured. Life-safety calls always go to 911, and GreetKeeper tells callers so.
What happens if my on-call tech does not pick up?
The call falls back to whatever you set: a second number, or a message with the address and problem sent straight through. You choose the order the numbers are tried.
How does it know a call is urgent?
It matches against the situations you listed, using the caller's own description. You stay in control of what counts, which is why the list is worth revisiting.
Write your urgent list with us
Ten minutes, and your on-call phone gets quieter.