Reception
Calls missed on another line, in a meeting or after closing go to whoever answers second. The reception agent answers on the first ring, at any hour, in the business's own greeting. The default, and where most clients start.
Agents
One phone agent. Seven jobs.
Everything on this site starts with an agent that picks up a business's phone on the first ring, at any hour, and does something useful during the call. What it is for decides which shape it takes. Start with reception, the one most clients ask for first, and fan out from there.
The phone agent
Answers the call and does the work on it
A voice agent, not a menu tree. It holds a normal back and forth conversation in a real New Zealand or Australian voice and acts while the caller is still on the line.
Before the greeting plays, the agent knows who is ringing: the number is matched against the business's address book and any connected CRM, accounting, job or practice system. During the call it answers questions about services, hours, prices and location from the business's own knowledge base, takes a detailed message, reads a live diary and books into it, lodges the enquiry or job into the business's own software, texts a link or takes a hard-to-hear detail by text, works out travel distance and cost from the business's own rates, or puts the call through to a person on rules the business writes.
Within seconds of the hang-up the business has a text and an email saying who rang, what they wanted and what was done, and the call is on the dashboard. Five, ten or fifteen calls can be answered at once on one number, with no queue.
Some things are locked, and a business cannot edit them out. The agent never guesses, never pretends to be human, never takes card numbers, and never gives medical, legal or financial advice. When it does not know, it arranges a call back rather than inventing an answer.
Every agent comes with its own real local number in the region the client asks for, and most businesses simply divert the number they already advertise to it. The agent is built from a template, so a new client is usually live the same day with nothing to install. The seven shapes below are those templates, and a client can run more than one.
The same agent, with the same knowledge, also answers by text, on website chat and by email.
Answer the call
The agents that pick up
What a business calls them, and the problem each one is bought to fix.
Sales
Enquiries arrive and nobody qualifies them until Friday. The sales agent asks the business's own qualifying questions, scores the enquiry, books a demo on the call, and drops a structured lead into the CRM.
Bookings
“Somebody will call you back to arrange it” loses the job. The bookings agent reads the live diary, offers real times and books while the caller is on the line, with no double bookings.
Personal assistant
One person's phone never stops, and every call is either a sales rep or a client who needs an answer now. The PA screens the call, takes a proper message, manages that one person's diary and texts them what happened.
After hours
The 7pm call goes to voicemail and the 2am emergency goes nowhere. The after-hours agent answers on the number's own clock, takes a message or a booking for the morning, and starts the on-call ladder when it is urgent.
Make the call
The agents that ring out
The same agent, the same knowledge, starting the conversation instead of waiting for it.
Outbound: campaigns, surveys and reminders
Quotes go quiet, customers lapse, and a survey by email gets a four percent response. The outbound agent rings a list the business owns, has a real conversation, flags the hot leads, confirms tomorrow's bookings and texts the people it misses.
Paperwork by phone call
Site inspections, incident reports and timesheets get done late or wrong. A field technician rings in, says what happened, and the agent interviews them through the business's own form, renders a PDF and files it into the job system.
The four percent figure is the email survey response rate quoted in the platform's own service descriptions, not a measurement of any client.
Sold through partners
You choose the agents, Talkgate runs them
Agents stack. Reception with bookings for a clinic network. Reception, after hours and paperwork for a facilities management company. Sales with outbound for a brokerage that lives in its CRM.
Sold through partners: you set the price, Talkgate runs the platform. You decide which agents a client gets and what the package is called; Talkgate provides the agent, the number and the hosting, and the features that come with every agent. The partner programme explains how a client is set up, supported and billed.
Next step
Hear the agent before you decide which one
A partner briefing is a working session, not a slide deck: a live agent taking a call, the templates clients start from, and the questions your own clients will ask.