Your phone number is your business. Before you hand it to anyone, you should know exactly what happens to it on our worst day. Here it is, in plain English.
You give us a backup number when you sign up. If our system can't take a call, the phone company sends that call to your backup number instead. The instruction that does this is stored at the phone company, not on our computers — so it still works when nothing of ours is running.
To use Booked Solid Inspector, your business number moves over to us. That's what lets Josh answer it, quote from your pricing, and put the job on your calendar.
It also means that if we went dark, you couldn't just flip a switch and start taking your own calls again. Moving a number back takes days, not minutes. We take away your escape hatch, so we owe you one that works without anybody at our end being awake to do anything about it.
Every number we answer has a short set of instructions sitting at the phone company. Three lines, and each one earns its place:
We tested this on a real call, using a deliberately broken connection to stand in for our system being down. The phone company's own log shows the failure and the next instruction four thousandths of a second apart — under a third of a second of quiet from the caller's side. Your caller doesn't experience an outage. They experience you picking up.
Josh answers your calls. On the rare occasion he can't — our equipment, or one of the services he relies on — the phone company sends the call straight to this number instead, so your caller reaches a person rather than silence.
It only fires when a call would otherwise fail, so it will not ring during normal business. But it can ring at any hour, because callers ring at any hour — so give us a phone you're willing to have go off at two in the morning.
That's a real option, not a trick question. If you'd rather we didn't ring you out of hours, say so and we'll take a message instead. Just know what you're choosing: with no backup number there's nowhere for a failed call to go.
Whichever one you'd actually answer — your mobile, your office, a partner, an answering service you already use. It needs to be a different phone from the business number you moved to us. Pointing it back at itself would send the call round in a circle.
Tell us and we'll update it. It's one field, and there's no charge for changing it. If you change mobile numbers, this is one of the things worth telling us the same week.
Not everything is covered, and we'd rather you knew which parts aren't before you sign than find out on the day.
| What's gone wrong | What happens to your calls |
|---|---|
| Our system is down | Covered. The call doesn't connect to us, so the instruction at the phone company moves on and rings your backup number. |
| Josh answers but gets stuck | Partly. Here the call did reach us, so the phone company has no failure to react to and your backup number won't ring. Instead Josh tells your caller that someone will call them straight back, and the call is flagged — rather than leaving them sitting in silence. |
| The phone company is down | Not covered, and nothing we build changes that. Your number lives there, and so does the instruction that protects it. If they go down, both go with them. |
We don't quote an uptime percentage. We don't measure our availability against a formal figure, so any number we gave you would be one we couldn't stand behind. We'd rather tell you what happens when something breaks than give you a statistic you can't check.
There's no service credit. You're month to month with no minimum term and no contract — if we let you down, you can leave on thirty days' notice. That's a stronger remedy than a few dollars off a bill.
It doesn't replace you answering your own phone. None of this is here to make you unreachable. It's here so that a bad hour at our end never costs you a job.
If something is affecting your incoming calls and we know about it, we'll email you at the address on your account, and email you again when it's fixed.
The transfer to your backup number doesn't wait for that email, and it doesn't depend on it. It happens on its own, at the phone company, whether or not anybody at our end has noticed yet.
Email support@bookedsolidinspector.com and ask. If your question is about the wording of your agreement rather than how the service works, legal@bookedsolidinspector.com is the better address.
The formal version. This page explains the service in plain English. The binding wording is Section 6.2 of the Service Terms, which forms part of your agreement with us. Where the two differ, the Service Terms govern.