Calls and approvals

A phone call is an escalation lane — what a guide reaches for when a customer has gone quiet, or a knot won’t come out over text. The guide decides when a call would move the outcome. You decide whether that call waits for you.

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Before a guide can call

The guide’s Phone calls channel must be set up: a published Voice Studio agent picked as its voice, and a calling number — by default the guide’s texting number, so the customer sees the number they already know, or another voice-capable number you own.

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Ask me before dialing

One switch on that same channel, off by default:

• Off — the guide calls when it judges it’s time, the same way it already sends texts and emails on the same enrollment attestation. Nothing pages you, nothing waits.
• On — the guide proposes the call with its reasoning, pages you, and parks in Needs you. Nothing dials until you tap.

The switch decides who authorizes a dial. It does not change what is checked before one: both modes write the same record — proposed, approved, placed — and every gate below runs identically either way. Only the name on the approval differs.

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When approvals are on

With approvals off there is no page and no tap: the guide records the same approval against the same proposal, and the dial goes out in the same wake. The number is not part of what it decides — that is filled in from the customer’s record, which is the thing the human echo in step 3 exists to protect.

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Gates re-run before every dial

An approval can be hours old by the time a call goes out — or seconds, when the guide gave it itself. Nothing is trusted from the moment it was given. Every check below re-runs against the customer’s stored number immediately before the dial, whoever approved it:

• STOP bars the dial, across channels. A customer who texted STOP is not called — opt-out applies to every channel, not just the one it arrived on.
• Consent — the enrollment attestation must cover this customer. See Compliance.
• Quiet hours refuse. Between 8pm and 8am in the recipient’s timezone, the dial is refused — never queued for later, because a deferred call would ring hours out of context. An unknown timezone blocks rather than guesses. The refusal lands on the watch timeline with its reason.
• The number is never the guide’s to choose. It is resolved from the enrolled customer’s stored phone at dial time. The guide asks for a call and gives its reasoning; it has no field to put a number in, in either mode.
• One approval, one dial. An approval is spent when the phone rings, and a crash mid-dial repairs the record rather than ringing a second time.

So a guide asking for a call is not a guide getting one — a dial can be refused after the guide asks for it, and the log says why. No answer, voicemail, or busy is terminal for that dial. Nothing retries it, and no guide places another call to the same customer for several hours. If a call is still worth making after that, it’s a fresh decision by the guide — and on a guide with approvals on, a fresh tap.

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On the call

The agent carries a disclosure rule its author cannot edit out: asked who they are speaking to or whether it’s an AI, it says so plainly. Whether that disclosure is also the agent’s opening line depends on its welcome message — see AI disclosure on voice. Whether the call is recorded is the agent’s own switch in Voice Studio, off unless someone turns it on. With it on, the opening line says so (publish adds the sentence if your welcome doesn’t) and the audio is stored. With it off, no audio is kept — the transcript still is — and the agent says the call isn’t recorded if asked. See recording. It’s briefed with the guide’s outcome, the recent conversation, and the customer’s name, and it answers from any knowledge attached to it. When the conversation reaches its natural end, the agent can end the call itself — it doesn’t hold the line waiting for the customer to hang up. One thing a call can never do: close the outcome. What’s said on a call is testimony — “yes, it’s all set up” is a lead, not a close. Only a fresh read from your system of record, or your explicit confirmation, closes an outcome. See Outcomes and verification.

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After the call

The transcript wakes the guide the same way an inbound text does: it reads what was said as context and continues the thread — usually back over SMS. Two places to read what happened:

• The watch page timeline shows the whole arc — the proposal, the approval and who gave it, the placed call, and the completed call. The call row opens a conversation sheet with the per-turn transcript, and on-demand audio when the agent records. See The watch page.
• The Voice Studio Conversations tab lists every conversation for an agent — time, kind (Phone or Web), and duration — and each row opens the same sheet: transcript bubbles, the recording if there is one, and a Sync button that reconciles against the voice vendor if a post-call delivery ever went missing.

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Calls in rehearsal

In rehearsal, there is no dial at all — a sandbox guide structurally cannot place a phone call. The same call is proposed, and instead of ringing anyone it is handed to you to take in the browser, playing the customer: a real voice session with the real agent and the real brief, producing a real transcript that wakes the guide — everything live except the phone leg. If the guide has approvals on, your tap is what hands it over; if not, it’s waiting for you as soon as the guide asks. Rehearsals never burn the redial window, because no call was ever placed.