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 number without leaving the CRM: search live availability, pay a one-time activation plus a monthly rental per number through secure card checkout, then put one or more reps on the number so they can call from it (see "Sharing numbers" below). New numbers are sold in Singapore only, priced per number: Singapore US$7.50 one-time + US$7.50/month. Contact support if your team needs a number in another country. Before your first number, the workspace owner completes a one-time calling verification. It asks for the legal business name, its UEN or company registration number, its registered address and a business registration document (for a Singapore company the ACRA business profile, otherwise the certificate of incorporation or equivalent); the authorised person's name and a photo or scan of their NRIC or passport; and a liability acknowledgement signed by typing their full name (you are responsible for all calls on your numbers and indemnify HuntSales and BizGrants Consulting Pte Ltd for misuse). Each document can be a PNG, JPG, WebP or PDF, up to 4 MB for both files together. The BizGrants team then reviews the application, checks the registration number against the one given at sign-up and, for a Singapore company, against the company register, and approves or rejects it, usually quickly; you are told by notification and email. Once approved you can buy numbers freely. The documents are stored privately and seen only by our reviewers. When you re-submit, we delete the documents you replaced, and every verification document is deleted if the workspace is deleted. Buying is blocked until verification is approved, and only the workspace owner can buy numbers. Once approved, the verification cannot be re-submitted or changed from the Numbers tab. If a verification is not approved, the workspace cannot buy a number, and any numbers it already has cannot make calls, until the owner updates the details, re-submits and the new application is approved. If we suspend calling for a workspace, for example after complaints about its calls, nobody in it can make calls until we lift the suspension: the Numbers tab and the softphone say so, and the owner gets an email with the reason. Reply to that email or contact support to resolve it. 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.

A new number can take a few business days to be approved by the phone carrier. Until then it shows "Waiting for carrier approval" on the Numbers tab and cannot make calls. You can still put reps on it; if one of them tries to call from it, the softphone tells them their calling number is waiting for approval from the phone carrier, and the workspace admin is told too. The number starts working on its own once it is approved, so there is no need to move the rep to a different number. If the phone carrier no longer has a number that was waiting (for example, its order was cancelled), the Numbers tab says "Not found at the phone carrier" instead. Remove it with the bin icon beside it, or ask support where there is no bin icon. Occasionally new Singapore numbers are paused for a few days while HuntSales renews its registration with the phone carrier; the Numbers tab says so in place of Get a number, checkout refuses before you pay, and you are not charged.

Sharing numbers. Several reps can share one number, and one rep can have several numbers. On the Numbers tab each number lists the reps on it. Add rep puts another rep on the number without taking them off any number they already have (the list shows which numbers each rep is already on), and the x beside a name takes that rep off. The first rep listed, tagged "Rings on incoming calls", is the one an incoming call to that number rings. Take them off and you are asked to confirm, because the next rep listed then rings instead (or nobody, if they were the only one). Only the Super Admin can change who is on a number, and every change is recorded in Activity. A rep with more than one number picks which one to call from under "Calling from" in the softphone. Every call they place goes out on that number, whether they dial from the softphone, a contact's Call button or the Call Queue, and the choice is remembered on that computer. A number waiting for carrier approval shows there as "Waiting for approval" and cannot be picked; if a rep's chosen number stops being usable, the call does not go out and the softphone asks them to pick another number in Calling from, rather than switching numbers without telling them. When a call to a shared number is missed, everyone on that number gets the missed-call notification. The call is logged to the rep it rang, so the others ring the caller back from the softphone rather than from their Call Log. The Call Log still shows which rep made each call, and the Super Admin can use its Number filter to see the calls on each number. Sharing does not change what you pay: your team can hold as many numbers as it has users, and each number is one monthly rental however many reps share it.

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: the workspace owner tops up calling credit (presets, or any amount from US$10 to US$1,000) on the Numbers tab and calls deduct by the minute. The rate card is published right there, with a price per minute for each country: outbound calls to Singapore are US$0.047 per minute, and every other country a Super Admin can turn on has its own price (see "Calling: which countries your team can call"). Calls are billed in whole minutes rounded up. 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. A single call can last up to 60 minutes and is ended automatically at that point. A call that stays connected after the rep has hung up is ended automatically within about ten minutes.

Making calls. Reps sign in to the softphone (the phone button at the bottom left, or in the top bar on a phone or small tablet) and call from the number shown under "Calling from" (a rep with several numbers picks one there). Call any contact with the Call button on their contact panel, or key/paste a number into the softphone's dial box. Numbers are labelled Direct Number (the person's own number, mobiles included) or Office Number (the company's main line); when a contact has both, pressing Call asks which one to dial, and the softphone shows which of the two you are calling. Outbound calls go to the countries your workspace has turned on, which is Singapore (+65) unless your Super Admin has added others (see "Calling: which countries your team can call"), and local numbers work without the country code (for example 9123 4567). Premium-rate and satellite numbers are always blocked for fraud protection. When a call ends the softphone asks for the call result (Connected, Voicemail, Callback, No answer, Not interested), which the Call Log counts. For a call to a contact it also shows Log a Call, exactly as on the contact's panel: pick the outcome, add notes and a follow-up date if you want one, and press Save. The contact's status, Last Contacted, timeline and follow-up then update just as they do from Log a Call, so there is no need to log the call again. A number keyed into the dial box has no contact, and a rep without the Log Calls permission sees no Log a Call, so for those Save keeps the call result and notes only.

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 first rep listed on that number (the one tagged "Rings on incoming calls" on the Numbers tab), 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 that rep: not to the other reps sharing the number, and never to the workspace owner as a fallback, so in Calling, Numbers put whoever should be picking up first on the number. 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 on it, 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. Every unread missed call also shows as a card just above the softphone, with Call back, View and Dismiss, until you act on it (see "Bell notifications and how to mute them"). 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, the outcome and a recording, with each call's cost shown to workspace owners. 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. A role with the "See all calls" permission sees every call in the workspace, the activity overview and the per-agent breakdown, and can play and download any recording, but never sees call costs and cannot place calls unless it also has the calling permission. Answered 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 when nobody answers, every rep on that number gets a missed-call notification in the bell. Inbound talk time is billed per minute (US$0.02/min). The Calls figure on the Dashboard, at the top and on the Calls card, is softphone calls plus calls logged by hand in the last 7 days. The softphone calls are the Call Log's own count for its Last 7 days, and a call logged by hand is added unless the softphone's Save logged it or linked it to its call, so a rep who calls from a mobile and logs the call is counted, and a softphone call that was also logged counts once. It covers your own calls, or the whole team's with "See all calls" or as the Super Admin. The card compares it with the 7 days before. A managed client login sees the call report's own count.

Call activity summary. Above the Call Log table sits an overview of the whole filtered set. A line at the top says which period it covers, such as "Last 30 days · 26 Aug to 24 Sep". A row of headline figures comes next: Calls (with the outbound and inbound split), Answer rate (with the number of answered calls, and how many of those were voicemail), Conversations (calls the rep tagged Connected, shown in green) and Talk time (with the average per answered call). Talk time reads in minutes and seconds under an hour, then in hours and minutes. The workspace owner also sees the calling credit balance there, or beside the dates when the range has no calls. Under it, the Outcomes card shows each wrap-up outcome with a bar: Connected, Callback, Not interested, Voicemail and No answer. The (i) beside each headline figure, and the one on the Outcomes card, says what it counts, and the one beside Talk time gives the exact total and the billed minutes. Click an outcome and the bar above the table explains it too. The Call Log opens on the last 30 days. Today, Yesterday, Last 7 days and Last 30 days buttons next to the dates set the range in one click, and the one that matches the dates shows as selected. 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 differ from talk time because 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, shown under the answer rate, 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, and the answer rate leaves out dials that did not connect because the other phone never rang. Connected, shown as Conversations, is what the REP ticked in the wrap-up form after the call. Everything in the Outcomes card 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.

Click a figure (the outbound or inbound count, Answer rate, Conversations or any outcome) 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 and how that outcome splits between inbound and outbound, and its (i) says where the figure comes from. Direction (All, Outbound, Inbound) and Search sit on the bar at the top of the table. They, and the figure you clicked, filter the ROWS only: the overview always covers every call in the date range. 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, so a figure above can be larger than the rows on one page.

Every rep at a glance. Anyone who sees the whole team (the Super Admin, or a role with "See all calls" such as a managed-service client login) gets a By agent card under the Outcomes card, listing every rep who made or took a call in the date range, most calls first: calls, answered, answer rate, Conversations, Callback, Not interested, Voicemail, No answer, talk time and the average per answered call, with a Team total row that matches the headline figures. Click a rep's name to narrow the whole page to that rep, the same as picking them in the Agent filter. The line above the figures then names the rep, and Show all agents beside it goes back to the whole team. The By agent card shows while the Agent filter is on All agents. The Callback, Not interested, Voicemail and No answer columns show on a wide screen, such as a desktop or a large laptop. On a smaller screen they are left out, and on a phone the answered and average columns are too, so the rest fit without scrolling sideways; the Outcomes card still carries the team's outcomes. Hide on the Outcomes card or the By agent card folds it down to one line (the outcome counts, or the busiest reps and their calls), and Show opens it again. Each card remembers this in your browser. Reps without See all calls see only their own figures, exactly as they see only their own calls, and have no By agent card.

Call transcription. Every answered call is recorded, and after it ends the recording is transcribed in English when the call lasted 30 seconds or more. Transcription is charged at US$0.011 a minute from your calling credit, in whole minutes rounded up, on every recorded answered call of 30 seconds or more, whether or not it is summarised. A call under 30 seconds is not transcribed and costs nothing for transcription. It is charged once per call: summarising the call, automatically or by hand, never charges the transcription again.

AI call summaries. With auto-summary on (toggle in Calling, Numbers, on by default), answered calls of 30 seconds or more are also summarised from that transcript 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 Prospect not reached (a phone menu, receptionist or other gatekeeper, voicemail, wrong number, or a call cut short before anything was discussed). "Prospect not reached" is a correct read of the call, not an error: the summary says who answered instead. 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 (2 AI credits), which needs the AI Assist permission. Each summary costs 2 AI credits. In the Call Log the AI summary column shows the verdict with the opening of the summary beside it; click it to read the whole summary. When the call named a follow-up, such as an email address to write to, a better time to call back or someone else to ask for, the summary ends with a "Next step" line, and the panel offers "Add as follow-up task" (needs the Tasks permission; the task goes on your Tasks page, linked to the contact) and, for an address, "Save ... to contact" (needs Edit Contacts; it only fills an empty email, checked again at the moment you click, so it never replaces an address already on file, and the change is recorded as coming from an AI suggestion). Nothing is saved until you click. Summaries made before the Next step line was added still offer any email address they mention. In a workspace HuntSales runs for you under HuntSales as a Service, summaries are included at no charge, and so is transcription.

Reading a call's transcript. Every call that has been transcribed has a View button in the Transcript column of the Call Log. It opens the whole call in a panel: who the call was with, the rep, the date and the duration at the top, the AI summary under that when the call has one, then every word that was said, with a Copy button that puts the transcript on your clipboard. Where the text tells two voices apart they are shown as turns; otherwise it reads as one block, the way it was written down. The words are written by machine from the recording after the call ends, so they arrive a few minutes after hanging up: until then the AI summary column says Transcribing... and the Transcript column shows a dash, and the View button appears once transcription finishes. A word can be missed or misheard. Reading a transcript is free: transcription is already paid for by the minute when the call happens. A transcript is the recording written down, so it follows the recording's permission. The Transcript column appears only for members who can hear recordings: the Super Admin, a role with "See all calls", or a role with "Listen to Call Recordings". A member with Listen to Call Recordings reads only their own calls' transcripts, and a member who cannot hear recordings does not see the column at all.

Exporting transcripts for analysis. On the bar at the top of the Call Log table, next to Search, sits an Export transcripts button. It downloads every call the filters on screen select, one row per call, as a CSV that opens straight in Excel or Google Sheets: date and time, rep, contact, company, number, direction, duration in seconds, outcome, the AI summary where there is one, whether the call was transcribed, and the full transcript text in its own cell. It is how you read what your reps actually say across a whole week or month, rather than one call at a time. Every filter applies, including the date range, the agent, the number, direction, outcome and the search box, so the file holds exactly what the table is showing. One export carries up to 5,000 calls, newest first, and tells you when your date range held more than that. It costs nothing: transcription is already paid for by the minute when the call happens, so reading those words back out is not charged again. Exporting needs three things on your role: access to the Call Log, permission to hear recordings, and Export Contacts, and the Hunter plan or above, as every export. A rep who sees only their own calls exports only their own.