- How does it handle an emergency?
- Urgency is assessed on the call. Anything time-critical is escalated immediately to whoever is on, by SMS and email, with the caller’s details and what they said. For anything life-threatening the caller is told to dial 999 while your team is alerted.
- What happens to a call it cannot handle?
- Every call is triaged into one of eight categories and routed with full context. If a caller wants a person, they get transferred. Nothing goes to voicemail.
- Does it understand accents and industry terms?
- Yes. It has run on a live UK line since September 2025, across more than five thousand real calls, including regional accents, sector terminology and distressed callers.
- How long does it take to go live?
- Three weeks from kickoff. The technical build takes about a day; the rest is supervised testing. Soma Healthcare was fully operational in three weeks.
- What does it cost?
- £299 a month for up to 500 calls, £595 for up to 2,000, and custom above that. Plus a one-time £950 onboarding fee. No per-user charges.
- Will it pay for itself?
- Compare it to the alternatives, not to nothing. Covering the same hours with people means paying someone to be there - evenings, weekends, and the quarter of calls that arrive when the office is shut. £299 a month is a few hours a week of one person’s time, and it covers every hour of every day. An answering service costs less than staff, but it takes a message. It does not decide what is urgent, it does not escalate to the right person at the time, and it does not leave you a record you can search a year later. That record is what you are buying.
- Is this only for large organisations?
- No. Smaller teams often feel it most, because a missed call has nowhere to go. Starter is built for exactly that.
- Does it schedule staff or dispatch engineers?
- No. It handles the call and the record. Scheduling and dispatch stay in whatever you already use.
- What happens to our data?
- It stays in your own environment. You get a processor agreement covering it, you can export everything at any time, and you can require certified deletion when the relationship ends.
- What if it does not work out?
- The onboarding fee carries a sixty-day money-back guarantee, counted from the day you sign - if it is not working for you, we refund it in full. Onboarding itself takes three weeks, so that leaves you well over a month of live running to judge it on. There is no lock-in on the monthly either, so you can stop whenever you like. We charge the fee because the work is real, and we refund it because you should not have to take our word for whether it worked.
- Can we keep our existing number?
- Yes. Port it or point it. Nothing about it changes until you say so.
Something not answered here?