A business whose people are not at a desk
A field business is phone-first by necessity: the call arrives while the only person who could answer it is under a sink or on a roof. Connect answers it, grounds the conversation in Knowledge, and turns whatever it cannot settle into a dated follow-up. What it cannot do is put the caller through to the person on site.
The shape of the day#
Calls arrive continuously and unpredictably; the people who could answer are the people doing the billable work; and every unanswered call is a job that goes to whoever picked up instead. That is the whole economics of this use case, and it is why phone answering matters more here than anywhere else in this section.
| Situation | What happens | Where it lands |
|---|---|---|
| Call during a job | Answered, grounded in Knowledge, transcript and summary written | The call record and the person it resolved to |
| Caller wants a time | Discussed only as far as Knowledge supports; a commitment becomes a follow-up with a reason | Follow-ups |
| Caller asks a price | Refused unless Knowledge carries it; escalated to a person | Needs You |
| Caller wants somebody now | Escalation recognised and a transfer queued; the completed hand-over is not available | Needs You, and a phone follow-up |
| Van has no signal | Nothing changes — Connect runs server-side, not on the engineer device | Unaffected |
The browser is the mobile experience#
The application is a web app at /app — plain ES modules, 34 hash routes, no build step — and it is what an engineer opens on a phone between jobs. These sources do not document a native mobile application, and this page does not imply one exists.
A person own line is available through the softphone: SIP over WebSocket to the carrier registrar, from the browser, recorded as a channel_routes row with channel='softphone'. That is how somebody in an office takes a call on the business number without a desk phone; it is not a substitute for a mobile ringing on a roof.
What genuinely cannot be done#
- Put the caller through to the engineer
- A completed human transfer is foundation and depends on a provider capability that is not enabled. The escalation is recognised and queued; the dependable outcome is a phone follow-up placed under the same gates as any outbound call.
- Text the customer an arrival window
- Outbound SMS is provider-dependent and the live carrier carries none.
readiness.messagingsays so on the Phone screen rather than presenting a thread that cannot send. WhatsApp or email are the working alternatives where the customer has either. - Replay the call to settle a dispute
- Recording is foundation and is not enabled on the live carrier. The transcript and summary exist and are searchable; audio does not.
- Answer as fast as a person picking up
- The realtime path floor is the model first token plus its end-of-turn detection — 3.3 s median on the best measured call. A caller who has rung three plumbers already will notice the pause.
Setting it up so the day works#
- Put the answers you repeat on every call into Knowledge: areas covered, what you do not do, what you need to know before quoting, typical process. Thin Knowledge shows up as a polite call that helps nobody.
- Decide what a scheduling promise is allowed to be. If Knowledge cannot support a lead time, every timing question escalates — which is correct, and which you would rather discover now.
- Set follow-up due times inside working hours, and use the
taskchannel for what only a person can do. Nothing ever sends a task follow-up. - Watch Needs You once each morning and once before you knock off. Line health escalates into it, so a number that stopped taking calls is visible there before it is visible in your revenue.
Where the money goes#
Almost entirely into voice. Audio tokens are metered at several times the rate of text, calls are the primary channel here, and length is the whole variable. Every call is priced and charged, and a call the remaining budget cannot cover is stopped rather than run on — which on a phone-led business is a number worth watching weekly rather than monthly.
Questions#
Can the caller be put through to whoever is on site?
No. The escalation phrase is recognised and a transfer is queued, and a supervisor can act on the live call from the app, but the completed hand-over depends on a carrier capability that is not enabled. What works reliably is a phone follow-up carrying the number and the reason, drained two per tick under the same gates as any outbound call.
Is there an app for the engineers phones?
There is the web application, which works in a phone browser. No native mobile application is documented in these sources, so treat the browser as the experience. Nothing depends on the engineer device being online — Connect runs server-side and keeps answering whether the van has signal or not.
Can Connect tell a customer the engineer is running late?
It can send that on email or WhatsApp if the customer has either and somebody or something creates the message. It cannot send a text message on the live carrier, which is the channel most field businesses expect for exactly this. Plan the notification around the channel the customer actually has.