Phone: the heaviest channel, and a deliberate add-on with us
With us, phone is not an included channel but an optional add-on, and that is deliberate. Voice is less forgiving than text: with email nobody minds a reply arriving a second later, but on a call every hesitant second stands out. Those who deploy it do so for clearly bounded conversations — availability outside office hours, routing, confirming an appointment.
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What characterises phone as a channel
| Aspect | How it works |
|---|---|
| Included? | No — optional add-on, configured separately |
| Tolerance for delay | Very low; silences are immediately noticeable |
| AI disclosure | At the start of the call, audibly |
| Suited to | Availability, routing, confirming |
| Not suited to | Conversations involving emotion, complaints or negotiation |
Note: this channel is not part of the platform by default. Email and WhatsApp Business are included; this is an optional add-on configured separately. It says so here because you should know it up front, not during the intake call.
Where it goes wrong in practice
The pitfall with voice is that it works too well in a demo and too poorly in practice. A demo call follows a path someone designed; a real caller interrupts, talks over the question, or calls about something that is not covered. That is why phone always needs a routing path that actually works, and why the AI should say at the start that it is an AI. Anyone skipping that second point discovers at the first complaint that it was not a detail.
When this is not the right channel
If most of your calls involve complaints, price negotiation or something emotional, voice is not the channel to start with. Start with text, where a human can review before anything goes out, and only consider phone once the text channel demonstrably runs stable.
What we need from you
This genuinely differs per channel, so it sits here rather than in a generic checklist:
- A number we may route, and a decision whether that applies always or only outside office hours.
- A routing path to a human that works at the moments it is needed — voicemail is not a routing path.
- A list of subjects the AI does not handle itself but escalates immediately. That list is shorter for voice than for text.
How this channel goes live
The sequence is the same for every channel: intake call, analysis of your existing communication from the past 90 days, and a shadow week in which Nova prepares answers but sends nothing. That week is not a formality — it is the moment where it becomes visible which work it genuinely handles on this channel.
What applies legally once an AI communicates on your behalf — the transparency obligation and the article 22 GDPR boundary — is set out in the AI Act for SMEs and AI and the GDPR for SMEs.