Retail & e-commerce
It rings while the morning's delivery is in bits on the stockroom floor.
It stops a wasted journey into town.
It answers before the third ring, tells the caller exactly what it knows and exactly what it doesn't, and puts the one thing it cannot see — your shelf — in front of somebody who can walk to it.
Free for 14 days. No card needed.
“Have you got the brown walking boots in a five and a half? I'd come over from Sedbergh.”
It cannot see your shelves and it says so in the same breath. It gets the line and the size down as she said them, puts them in front of whoever is on the floor with her number attached, and tells her only what the shop can actually promise — the price, the closing time and the put-by rule.
It rings while the morning's delivery is in bits on the stockroom floor.
Their words
Say it the way your callers say it, and watch what it reaches for
The agent has fourteen tools. It has the same fourteen on every one of these pages — what changes with your trade is which one a sentence lands on, and how much of the job is done by the time it puts the phone down.
It hears
“got it in a five and a half?”
It reaches for
save_lead_details
Writes the line and the size exactly as she said them. It never says it's there — it can't see your shelf.
The words on those chips are the trade’s, not ours: SKU, available to promise, phantom stock, put by, shrinkage, click and collect. Get one of them wrong on the phone and the person on the other end knows within a sentence.
Run it
Every line on the job card came from a second you can point at
One call, on a rail. Drag it forward and it fills in. Drag it back and it comes apart — the slot empties, the tool leaves the log, and the confirmation un-writes itself.
Agent
Fell and Field, Kendal — you're through to the shop's answering assistant. What can I look up for you?
Tools it ran
- Nothing yet — it is still listening.
Put-by slip
- What she's after
- Line, off your own listyour documents added
- Caller
- On the shelf
Nobody has told her the boot is there. Beth has the size and the number, Rhona has the price and the closing time in writing, and if it isn't on the shelf she finds that out before she gets in the car.
Played back in 14 seconds, or listen to the whole call (1:04) at its own pace. The clock on the rail keeps the written call’s time.
Build this agentThe wall
It will not tell a caller something is in stock
Lean on it. The words change as the caller pushes; the answer does not. Push all the way and the only thing that gives is that it stops arguing and fetches a person.
Pressure 1 of 4
Caller
“Have you got it in a five and a half or not?”
Agent
I can tell you it's a line we stock and it's £145. What I can't tell you is whether there's a five and a half on the shelf this minute.
Anyone who wants certainty about a shelf is handed to somebody who can go and stand in front of it, and she is told that person's name before she hangs up.
The relay
Whoever you put on the escalation list — usually the owner knows in 11 seconds
Two calls stop being shop calls the moment you hear them. A product that burnt, sparked, cut or made somebody ill — that is a safety report with duties attached, not a return. And the caller who says he's your supplier and needs the bank details changed, or your manager and needs gift cards bought and the numbers read back. Neither waits for the morning, and neither is put through to anyone — not as a limitation we are dressing up, but because the reason this call reached an answering agent at all is that nobody was standing next to the phone. The alert goes to a mobile and the detail is written down behind it, which is the pair that still works at ten past eight on a Sunday.
0.0s
The caller is still talking. They never hear a hold, and they are never told to ring back.
Your rules
It starts briefed for your trade. The brief is yours to change.
Your trade decides what it knows on day one. You decide the rest — and every line you change shows up in how the next call goes, not in a settings page nobody reads.
Screen the reps — I'm not taking another card-machine call
Anyone opening with who looks after your card processing gets a polite no, and his pitch becomes a line in the message list rather than a handset ringing across a queue. What reaches you is something you can scroll past.
A burn, a spark or an injury reaches me the same hour
It stops handling the call as a return, writes down the product and what it did, and your phone goes while she's still on the line.
Hold things for 24 hours, not just till closing
Off. The call goes ahead without it.
Same agent, your vocabulary. The trade seeds the prompt; everything after that is yours, and you can read the whole of it in the dashboard rather than guessing at what it was told.
Go live
A number of its own, briefed for your trade, this afternoon
Everything on this page works on some plan. Here is exactly which, so nothing you just watched turns out to be behind a wall you did not know about.
On any plan
Nothing to connect beyond saving a contact and adding your documents.
- Writes down the details you asked for
- Takes a message, in the caller's words
- Tells your team, during the call
- Answers questions from your own documents
- Puts the caller through to a person
Starter — $49 a month
Needs a text-capable number on your account.
- Texts the caller a confirmation
Pro — $249 a month
Needs Google Calendar connected. Until it is, these calls become messages instead.
- Reads your real diary before it offers anything
Your agent gets a new number; we cannot port your existing one, so the new number sits alongside your line and you forward to it when you are ready. Local numbers only — no mobile or toll-free yet.
What you just proved
Six claims. You operated the ones that are filled in.
- Three kinds of call come in, and it knows which is whichTry it
- It understands how your callers actually talkTry it
- Every line on the paperwork came from a second of the callTry it
- It will not say the thing that would land you in troubleTry it
- When it can't finish a call, a person knows while the caller is still thereTry it
- The brief is yours to changeTry it
The one we did not demonstrate
About three calls in ten go unanswered, and far worse on a Saturday
Our figure, not a study. Our estimate, from the shape of a shop's week, because there is no retail-specific published one we would stand behind — the 62% that circulates in this category traces back to a marketing firm with no method attached, and we are not going to launder it by quoting it. What we can reason about is the clash: the phone peaks in the same hour the delivery is being checked in, and again when the floor is at its busiest, so the misses cluster exactly where the footfall is. A wet Tuesday sits nearer a quarter; a Saturday afternoon in December is over half; and everything after the shutters come down is missed by definition, because the website doesn't shut. One caveat we would rather print than hide — a real share of what you miss is somebody selling you a card machine, so not every miss is a lost customer, and you cannot tell which is which without answering. The number that settles it is already in the handset behind your till: scroll the missed list back a fortnight and see how many of those numbers ever tried you again.
Around $8 for each call you get back
Our figure, not a study. The lowest figure on this site, and correctly so: nineteen calls in twenty are worth nothing — hours, directions, a returns question, a rep — and the twentieth is someone driving in for a £145 pair of boots. Our workings are in pounds because the shop is, and the dollar figure above is the same sum done again for a shop with a till in dollars rather than that one put through an exchange rate. Disagree with whichever step you like: a phone caller's basket runs higher than a browser's because she is asking about one named thing, call it £45; about a third of recovered calls carry purchase intent; about four in ten of those buy; and most of the rest go to whoever answered first. That lands a shade under £7. Then the line other trades don't have — a quarter of a shop's calls are about money you have already taken, and a few of those become a refund demand or a chargeback when nobody picks up, which is where the last pound comes from. We are not going to multiply it by your call volume and print a year's total. Do that on the back of a delivery note, where you can also knock the reps off it.
- Shop traffic peaks mid-afternoon, and the Saturday before Christmas is the heaviest day of the year.
- Sensormatic Solutions, holiday shopping traffic forecast, 2025. A forecast rather than a count, built on Sensormatic's own in-store traffic-counting network: daily store traffic peaking between 14:00 and 15:00, with Saturday 20 December projected as the busiest day in the UK and Ireland. We have the year, not the release date, so the year is what this says. Sensormatic sells the traffic-counting and loss-prevention systems the forecast is built on.
Questions
What retail & e-commerce owners ask first
My customers ring to find out whether the thing is actually on the shelf. Your robot can't walk to the stockroom.
He is right, and the answer that dodges it deserves to lose him. It cannot walk to the stockroom, it never will, and it is not even allowed the fiction the stock file offers — it has no sight of your stock at all, only your documents and a phone number. What it does instead is refuse to be confident: it says what the boot is and what it costs, says plainly that it cannot see the shelf, and gets the size and the caller's number in front of someone who was already going out the back for four other reasons. She gets a text instead of a ring-out, and the shop gets a phone number for somebody who was about to spend £145. Then there is the larger half he is not counting. Opening hours, the car park, where's my order, can I bring this back, do you do vouchers: on our estimate about two-thirds of a shop's inbound needs nobody with legs, and it currently comes off the floor in four-minute chunks, because a ninety-second call in a shop is ninety seconds of talking and three minutes of walking. Clearing that is what buys back the time to take the one call that genuinely needs a human eye on a shelf. And the reps are free.
Can it see my stock?
No, and it is not allowed to behave as though it can. It has your documents — what you sell, what it costs, your hours, your collection and returns policy — and it has a phone number. It does not have your till system, your website's stock count or your stockroom. So it says what it knows, asks the floor to look at what it doesn't, and gets the caller's number before she rings the next shop. The thing an owner cannot afford is a phone that is confident about a shelf, and this one is built so it cannot be.
Can it tell someone where their order is?
No. There is no order lookup, no courier feed and no account history, so it takes the order number and the postcode and puts them in front of whoever picks. That limit has a second edge worth having: it cannot read a customer's home address to a stranger who claims to be them, and it cannot change a delivery address on an order in flight. Both of those are how parcels get diverted, and both are a person's job every time.
Somebody will read their card number out. What then?
It stops them, and it does not repeat or store a digit of it. A card number spoken on a line you control drags the whole phone system into PCI scope, and a recording with a PAN in it is a problem you did not have that morning. It sends the payment link you gave it by text, or it puts the caller through to a person on a line set up for it.
What about the ones quoting consumer law at me over a return?
It does not adjudicate. It reads your published returns window and what you do about postage, off your own documents, and it logs what she is asking for with the order number and the date. It will not authorise a refund, waive anything or tell her the return is accepted — and it will not do the opposite either, because no refunds and it's past twenty-eight days are the two sentences that turn a return into a complaint letter.
The shop shuts at half five. Does that matter?
It is most of the point. The shutters come down and the website carries on selling, so the evening, the Sunday and the bank holiday calls — order chasers, returns, can I collect tomorrow — arrive into a dark shop and every one of them is missed by definition. Those callers get an answer at nine at night and you get the order numbers on the counter at nine in the morning.
Start
Put it on your retail & e-commerce line
Fourteen days free, no card. Point your calls at it when you are ready, and take them back the moment you are not.
It answers on the first ring and tells the caller it is an assistant.
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