Calls covers telephony: calls to and from people outside your organisation, on your own numbers.
Internal calls between colleagues are a different thing and live in Sync Chat.
The surface
Five tabs.
Activity. Every call, in and out, with live ones showing as ringing or in progress while they happen.
Connections and Leads. Call lists to work through, covered in their own article.
Agents. Who is available to receive calls, and why.
Settings.
Making a call
From the dialler, or from a record.
From the record is better whenever there is one. The call attaches to that person automatically, and everything you know about them is on screen while you talk, which is the entire argument for having telephony inside the platform rather than beside it.
While a call is happening
Live calls show in the list as they happen, ringing or in progress.
That is more useful than it sounds for anybody running a team. A glance at the list tells you how many conversations are open right now, and a customer asking to speak to somebody who is visibly on another call gets a truthful answer rather than a guess.
The activity list
Each row carries a direction glyph, so inbound, outbound and missed are distinguishable without reading. Missed calls are marked as missed rather than shown as an inbound call of zero seconds, which is the distinction that matters when you are scanning for what to return.
The list filters by outcome, so "everything that went to voicemail this week" is one control rather than an export.
Wrapping up a call
After a call, three things: the outcome, whether a follow-up is due, and marking it done.
The outcomes are deliberately few.
| Outcome | Means |
|---|---|
| Connected | You spoke to them |
| Left voicemail | You did not, and left a message |
| No answer | You did not, and did not |
| Wrong number | The number is bad |
| Follow up needed | Spoke, and something is outstanding |
Record one every time, including on the calls that went nowhere. Without outcomes you have a count of calls, which measures effort. With them you have a count of what those calls achieved, which is the only version worth managing against.
Wrong number is the one people skip and the most valuable of the five, because it is the only signal that stops the same bad number being dialled every week for a year.
Recordings and transcripts
Where recording is enabled, the recording plays back on the call.
Transcripts arrive automatically, usually a minute or two after the call ends, along with an AI summary. You will see the transcript as processing while that happens, and it will tell you if it failed rather than showing an empty box. If transcripts are turned off for your organisation, or the call was not recorded, it says that too rather than leaving you guessing.
The summary is the part people actually use. Reading thirty seconds of summary before returning a call you took four days ago is the difference between a good second conversation and an apologetic one.
Recording depends on your configuration and your obligations. Where calls are recorded, saying so at the start is usually a legal requirement and always the decent thing to do.
The call timeline
Opening a call also shows the other calls with the same number.
This is the detail worth knowing about. Somebody ringing for the fourth time this month is a different conversation from a first call, and the timeline tells you which one you are in before you say hello.
Notes
Write the note straight after. A call with no note is one whose content exists only in a single person's memory, and the entire point of logging calls is that somebody else can pick the relationship up.
Three lines is enough: what they wanted, what you agreed, what happens next. The transcript captures the words; the note captures the decision.
Voicemail
A message left becomes its own thread, so it queues like anything else rather than sitting in a phone system nobody checks.
Treat it as inbound work. A voicemail is somebody who tried to reach you and could not, which usually makes it more urgent than an email rather than less.
It also queues where somebody other than the intended recipient can see it, which is the point. A voicemail box only one person checks is a voicemail box that goes unchecked during the week they are on leave.
Returning a missed call
The most common daily job on this surface, and the one worth having a habit for.
Open the call before dialling. The timeline tells you whether this is a first attempt or a fourth, and the previous notes tell you what they wanted last time.
Return it the same day. A missed call returned the next morning is a customer who has already tried somebody else.
If you cannot reach them, log the attempt. Two people each trying once and neither recording it looks identical to nobody trying at all.
Where a call fits with everything else
The thread in the inbox, the record on the person, the entry on the calendar and the activity in reporting are all the same call.
Nothing is synchronised, because nothing is separate. That is why a call made here is visible to a colleague immediately, and a call made on a mobile is not.
Two honest limits
A call made on a personal phone is invisible. If it mattered, log it. The system knows about calls that go through it and nothing else.
No summary replaces your judgement. The AI summary is a good record of what was said and a poor record of how it landed. If a call went badly, say so in the note.
Habits worth having
Call from the record, always. It costs nothing and attaches everything.
Wrap up within a minute of hanging up. Not at the end of the day, when you will remember three of the seven.
Record every outcome, including the failures. A list where only the successes are marked cannot be read at all.
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