Calling: softphone, numbers and talk time

Calling lives under Outreach in the sidebar and is included on the Hunter and Apex plans, with one calling seat per user on your subscription. It has three parts.

Numbers. Under Calling, open the Numbers tab to buy a local number (Singapore, Hong Kong, Australia, UK or US; call Malaysia from a Singapore number) without leaving the CRM: search live availability, pay a one-time activation plus a monthly rental per number via secure Stripe checkout, then allocate the number to a rep as their caller ID. Number prices vary by country: Singapore is US$7.50 one-time + US$7.50/month, and UK and US local numbers start from US$1.50. Before your first number, your workspace completes a one-time calling verification: business details, a photo or scan of the authorised person's NRIC or passport, a signed liability acknowledgement (you are responsible for all calls on your numbers and indemnify HuntSales and BizGrants Consulting Pte Ltd for misuse). The BizGrants team then reviews the submitted document and approves your workspace, usually quickly; once approved you can buy numbers freely. Buying is blocked until verification is approved. The first time you buy a number you accept a short calling acceptable-use policy (call responsibly, comply with the Do Not Call registry and telemarketing law, no spam or fraud); this is a one-time acknowledgement per workspace. Your team can hold as many numbers as it has users. Releasing a number stops its monthly charge.

Calling lines. Up to 10 outbound calls can run at the same time across the platform, and up to 5 at once within a single workspace (inbound is unlimited). If every line is busy you'll see a brief "all lines are busy, try again in a moment" message; this limit is raised as volume grows.

Talk time. Calls are prepaid: top up calling credit (presets or any amount from US$10) on the Numbers tab and calls deduct by the minute. The rate card is published right there, for example Singapore is US$0.047 per minute, billed in 1-minute blocks. The card shows your balance, a low-credit warning, and a recent-activity list of every top-up and call deduction. When credit hits zero, dialing pauses until you top up.

Making calls. Reps sign in to the softphone (the phone button at the bottom left) with their allocated number as caller ID. Call any contact with the Call button next to their phone number, or key/paste a number into the softphone's dial box. Singapore numbers work without the country code (for example 9123 4567); other countries need the code (for example +60 12 345 6789). You can dial Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, the Philippines, Thailand, Vietnam, Hong Kong, Macau, Taiwan, China, Japan, South Korea, India, Australia, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, Ireland, the United States and Canada, Germany, France, the Netherlands and the UAE; premium-rate and satellite numbers are blocked for fraud protection, and any other destination can be switched on if you ask support. When a call ends the rep tags the outcome (Connected, Voicemail, Callback, No answer, Not interested) and notes.

Give an unanswered call 15 seconds to ring. On an outbound call that has not been picked up, the Hang up button is greyed out for the first 15 seconds and counts down - "Hang up in 9s" - then turns red and works normally. That is roughly three rings. It is not a bug and there is nothing to fix: hanging up after one or two rings is the pattern carriers score as abandoned dialling, and it is what gets a number tagged "Spam Likely", then blocked, then useless for everyone on the team. The wait applies to nothing else. The moment the other person picks up, the button is live. An inbound call can always be ended immediately. A call that failed to connect at all can always be ended immediately. And the block expires by itself after 15 seconds whatever else happens, so it can never trap a rep on a live call.

Taking notes while you are on the call. The softphone and a contact's card work at the same time. Opening a contact no longer puts the phone out of reach: the softphone stays on top of the card, so you can mute, key an extension or hang up without closing anything first. A note you have half typed is kept while you look something up, so you can switch to the contact's Activity tab to read an older note, switch back, and carry on where you left off. Closing the card, or jumping through to a related contact, still clears an unsaved note, so save it first. On a screen narrower than about 1264 pixels the softphone shrinks to its round button when you open a contact, so the two do not sit on top of each other; click it to open it again, and it opens by itself when a call comes in or you start one.

Answering inbound calls. When someone calls one of your numbers, the softphone rings in the browser of the rep that number is allocated to, showing the caller's name if they match a contact. Answer picks up; Decline hangs up and the call is logged as missed, exactly as it was before. Ringing goes only to the allocated rep and never falls back to the workspace owner, so allocate a number in Calling → Numbers to whoever should be picking up. To receive calls the rep must be signed in to the softphone with that browser tab open: signing in once does not make you reachable forever, and closing the tab, going to sleep or losing the network takes you offline within about two minutes. If the number has nobody allocated, the rep is not signed in or is offline, or the workspace is out of calling credit, the phone does not ring and the call is logged as a missed call with a notification instead. Nobody answers within 25 seconds and it becomes a missed call too. Answering costs the same inbound rate as any inbound call (US$0.02/min).

Call Log and recordings. Every call lands in the Call Log under Calling: agent, contact, duration, what it cost, the outcome, and a recording. Reps see their own call history; owners see the whole team. Hearing recordings is a separate permission, "Listen to Call Recordings", which is OFF by default: members see their call history but cannot play recordings unless an admin ticks that permission in Team to Permissions. A member with it hears only their own calls' recordings; the Super Admin can always hear every recording. Calls are recorded automatically. Inbound calls to your numbers are logged too: if the caller matches one of your contacts you'll see who called by name, and the rep holding that number gets a missed-call notification in the bell. Inbound talk time is billed per minute (US$0.02/min).

Call activity summary. Above the Call Log table sits a summary of the whole filtered set, grouped by the question each figure answers. "How much did we dial?" gives Outbound and Inbound, with the total alongside. "How many did we reach?" gives Answered (with the answer rate), No answer and Voicemail. "What came of it?" gives Not interested, Callback, Connected and the average call length. A quiet line underneath gives talk time and billed minutes. Today, Yesterday and Last 7 days buttons set the dates in one click. The figures are counted in the database over every matching call, not over the rows on screen, so they stay right however many calls there are. Billed minutes sits next to talk time because they differ: the carrier rounds every call up to a whole minute, so a hundred forty-second calls is about 67 minutes of talking but 100 billed minutes.

Answered and Connected are different numbers on purpose, and it is normal for them to be far apart. Answered is what the CARRIER reported: the call was picked up. It counts answering machines and receptionists as well as prospects, which is why it runs high. Connected is what the REP ticked in the wrap-up form after the call. Everything under "What came of it?" - Not interested, Callback, Connected - comes only from that wrap-up form: nothing is inferred from the recording, the transcript or the AI summary. No answer is counted from either side, because a rep can tick "No answer" and the carrier also records it when nobody picks up. The Answered figure used to be labelled "Connected", which put two different meanings of the word side by side; the label changed, the arithmetic did not.

Click any figure to narrow the table below to exactly the calls behind it, and click it again to clear. The bar that appears says what is being shown, how that outcome splits between inbound and outbound, and where the figure comes from in plain words. There is also a Direction filter (All, Outbound, Inbound). Those three controls - search, direction and the clicked figure - filter the ROWS only; the figures above always cover every call in the date range, and the screen says so when they differ. The table shows 50 calls a page, newest first, with Newer and Older buttons underneath and a line saying which rows you are looking at out of the total. A figure above can therefore be larger than the rows on one page; the screen says so.

Owners with more than one rep calling get a "By agent" button that opens a per-rep table of calls, outbound, inbound, answered, answer % and talk time; reps see only their own figures, exactly as they see only their own calls.

AI call summaries. With auto-summary on (toggle in Calling → Numbers, on by default), answered calls over 30 seconds are automatically transcribed and summarised into the contact's timeline with a buying-temperature read. Four outcomes: Hot (they asked to move forward or a specific next step was agreed), Warm (the prospect themselves engaged and showed interest but committed to nothing), Cold (reached and not interested), and Not reached (a phone menu, receptionist or other gatekeeper, voicemail, wrong number, or a call cut short before anything was discussed). The read is based only on what the PROSPECT said: a polite call with no rejection is not a warm lead, and where the evidence is thin the cooler label is chosen on purpose, because a false warm lead wastes the follow-up and hides the real ones. You can also summarise any call by hand from the Call Log using the Summarise button. Each summary costs 2 AI credits plus per-minute call transcription (US$0.011/min) drawn from your calling credit.