Get a number the agent answers
Channels → Phone lists numbers on sale — local by area code, or toll-free — and you pick one. From that moment the agent answers it: call it from your own phone and have the conversation your customers are about to have. This is the single most useful five minutes in the whole setup, and it is the one people skip.
Listen for three things — whether it gets your company's name right, whether it knows your returns policy, and what it does when you say 'let me talk to someone'. All three are fixable, and all three are embarrassing to discover from a customer.
Pick a number
Local to your customers, not to your office, if the two differ — or toll-free if you serve a whole country.
Call it yourself
From a phone that is not forwarded into Wiredesk, or you will create a loop.
Forward your published line
In your existing carrier's settings, forward to the new number. Your published number never changes.
Keep the number on your business cards
Forwarding is the whole trick. Your published line stays exactly where it is, with the carrier you already pay, and simply sends its calls onward. Nothing about your listing, your signage or your invoices has to change, and turning the agent off later is one setting at your carrier rather than a migration.
If you would rather send calls to us straight from your own trunk or PBX, with no intermediate number in the path, that is available for high-volume workspaces and switched on for you — ask, and the Setup card under Channels › Phone gains a form giving you the address to forward to.
Set the transfer number before you go live
When a caller asks for a person, the agent transfers them live — to the number in Transfer calls to a person, under Handoff on the agent. That number must be a real phone somebody answers, and it must not be a line that forwards back into Wiredesk, or the caller is handed back to the agent they just escaped. Type it however you like — spaces, dashes and brackets are fine — and it is saved in international format.
The transfer also needs the switch beside that number to be on; it comes on when you save the number, but check it has not been turned off. Without both there is no transfer tool at all, and a caller saying 'representative' is told nobody can take the call and offered a message instead. This is the most common gap we see on live agents, and it is a single field.
Keep the audio of each call
Every call is transcribed. To keep the audio as well, switch on Record calls in the Recordings card under Channels › Phone. Telling callers is up to you: turn on the AI & recording notice in the Voice & greeting card on the same page, or say it in your Phone greeting, wherever the law asks for it. The recording plays above the transcript in Conversations and is deleted with the conversation.
What a call costs
Voice is $0.20 per started minute, which means a call lasting two minutes and ten seconds bills as three. That is the same rounding your telephony provider uses, and it is what the estimates in the product assume, so the figure you see never comes in under the invoice.
The practical consequence: an agent that answers a question in ninety seconds costs half of one that takes three minutes to get there. Good knowledge is a cost control, not just a quality one.