Call Transfers
When to hand a live caller straight to a human.
On this page
A transfer hands a live caller straight to a person. It’s the right answer for a small number of calls, and the wrong answer for most of them.
Get this wrong and your evenings go
Used well, transfers mean the genuinely urgent caller reaches a human in seconds. Used badly, your phone rings all evening with the same calls you installed a receptionist to stop taking.
When to transfer
- Safety. A gas smell, an electrical burning smell, active flooding.
- Genuine emergencies as you’ve defined them — no heat in freezing weather, no water.
- Named accounts. Commercial contracts or key clients you always want handled personally.
- The caller insists. Someone who firmly asks for a person should get one, if one is available.
When not to
- Routine bookings
- Your receptionist books faster than you can while you're on a job.
- Price questions
- If it can't answer, add it to FAQs. Transferring hides the gap instead of fixing it.
- Anything at 10pm that isn't an emergency
- Capture and book it. The caller gets certainty and you get sleep.
- Sales calls and suppliers
- Exactly the calls you wanted to stop taking.
Every transfer is a call you take
How to set it up
- 1
Write the trigger list specifically
In Services, describe exactly what qualifies. “Gas smell” is a trigger; “urgent” is not — every caller thinks theirs is urgent.
- 2
Choose the destination number
A phone someone actually answers. If it’s a rota, use the on-call number rather than a person’s mobile.
- 3
Decide the hours it applies
Many businesses transfer during working hours and capture-and-flag at night. Both can be true.
- 4
Test it
Ring in and trigger it deliberately. Confirm the right phone rings and the caller isn’t left in silence during the handover.
If nobody picks up
This is the part people forget. A transfer to an unanswered phone is worse than no transfer — the caller has been passed around and then dropped.
Your receptionist handles this: if the transfer isn’t answered, it comes back on the line, apologises, captures the details in full, and marks the lead urgent so it stands out in your alerts.
The caller is never abandoned
What the caller experiences
A transfer that works
A transfer that doesn't connect
Yes. Commercial accounts can route to one number and residential emergencies to another. Keep the rules few and clear — complicated routing is hard to test and easy to get wrong.