If your receptionist gave a long answer, the call could be cut off moments after it finished speaking — or before. We give a caller a fixed window to reply before releasing the line, and that window was being counted from the moment the assistant started talking rather than from the moment it stopped. So the longer and more useful the answer, the less time the caller had. On one call we looked at, an answer confirming an appointment and reading back a phone number and email address took about eighteen seconds to say, against a twenty second window — leaving under two seconds of actual silence before the line was released. That is the worst possible place for this to happen: reading details back is exactly when a caller needs a moment to check them. The window now starts when the assistant stops speaking, so a caller always gets the full time to answer.
Somebody else speaking in the room could wipe out the caller’s question. If a second voice was picked up in the moment between a caller finishing and the assistant replying, the first question was discarded entirely — not just unanswered, but gone, so it could not be picked up later in the call either. On the call we looked at, a caller asked for half past two, somebody nearby said something unrelated, and the caller had to apologise and ask again. The words are now carried forward, so the assistant answers what was actually asked. A caller correcting themselves mid-sentence still has the correction win, as before.
Our own support line would not let you say goodbye. Saying “no, that’s all, thank you — have a good day” did not end the call: it kept asking if there was anything else until the caller hung up. We were only recognising a sign-off when those were the last words spoken, so a perfectly ordinary “thanks, take care” at the end went unnoticed. Sign-offs followed by a pleasantry now end the call properly, on our support line and on your receptionist.
And our support line is quicker on password questions. Asking “how do you reset your password?” took a couple of seconds to answer because it was being worked out from scratch, when it is a question with a fixed answer we already had ready. It now answers immediately. Try your receptionist in Call Studio