Some calls should never be handled by software. The handover is how you decide which.
Set the handover number
In the receptionist configuration, enter your escalation number in full international form, like +61400000000. It is rejected in any other format, because a number written in national form is ambiguous once it leaves the country and a failed handover is a lost job.
This is the phone that rings when the receptionist decides a person is needed. Make it a phone somebody actually carries.
Choose the trigger words
Alongside the number you set escalation keywords. If a caller uses one, the receptionist stops trying to help and hands over.
Pick the words your business genuinely cannot afford to have answered by software. For a trade that is usually emergency, leak, flood, no power. For a clinic it is usually pain, urgent, bleeding. For anyone it should include a plain request to speak to a person.
What the caller experiences
The receptionist tells them it is putting them through and rings your handover number. If nobody answers, the call comes back and it takes a message instead, so the caller is never dropped into silence.
Check your phone screening first
This is the one that catches people out. If your mobile screens or silences calls from numbers not in your contacts, an escalated call can be sent to voicemail before it ever rings, and from the caller's side it looks like you ignored them.
Save the receptionist number to your phone contacts, and turn off silence-unknown-callers on the phone you nominated. Then ring the receptionist and trigger a handover on purpose to prove it rings through.
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