Smart routing

By default, one number means one agent: everyone who rings gets the same greeting and the same conversation.

Smart routing changes that. It picks the agent based on the caller's CRM stage — where they sit in your pipeline — so a brand-new enquiry and a long-standing customer can get quite different treatment on the same phone number.

Telephony → Numbers → open a number → Configuration

What you can do with it

Some patterns that work well:

• New vs existing. Unknown callers and new leads get the sales agent, which qualifies and books. Customers get the support agent, which knows about orders and problems.
• Won customers get VIP treatment. A shorter greeting, straight to a human transfer.
• Lost or unqualified leads get a lighter-touch agent that doesn't spend expensive minutes.
• Different scripts by pipeline position. A lead at "quote sent" hears an agent primed to close; a lead at "new" hears one primed to qualify.

Setting it up

1. 1

   Define your stages first

   Routing keys off your CRM stages, so those need to exist and be meaningful before routing does anything useful.

2. 2

   Open the number

   Telephony → Numbers, click the number. The Configuration tab has two independent sides: inbound and outbound.

3. 3

   Turn on dynamic routing for the side you want

   With it off, you pick a single agent — that works on every plan. With it on, you map stages to agents.

4. 4

   Map stages to agents

   One agent per stage. You don't have to map every stage — anything unmapped falls through to your normal agent.

A Routing badge appears next to the number in the list once it's active, so you can see at a glance which lines have rules.

Inbound and outbound are separate

The same number has two independent sets of rules:

• Inbound — someone rings your number. The caller is matched to a contact by their number, and their stage decides which agent answers.
• Outbound — an automated call goes out using this number as caller ID. The contact's stage decides which agent makes it.

They're separate because they usually want different things. Inbound is about who's calling you; outbound is about what you're trying to achieve with that contact.

How the agent is chosen

The system works down a list and takes the first thing that applies:

1. An explicitly chosen agent — if something specified one (a campaign pinned to an agent, for example), that wins.
2. A stage rule, if dynamic routing is on for that side and the caller's stage is mapped.
3. The number's single agent — the one you set with dynamic routing off.
4. Your default agent.

That fallback chain means routing can never leave a call unanswered. A caller with no contact record, no stage, or a stage you haven't mapped simply gets the normal agent.

What it needs to work

• The caller must be matched to a contact. Routing works off a stage, and a stage lives on a contact. An unknown number has no stage, so it takes the fallback.
• The stage must be mapped. Unmapped stages fall through.
• The mapped agent must still exist. If you delete an agent that a rule points at, that rule quietly falls back rather than breaking the call.

Plan requirements

Stage-based routing needs Professional or above. On lower plans the toggle appears with a plan badge and can't be switched on.

Choosing a single agent per number and per direction works on every plan — that's just the normal number configuration, not smart routing.

When not to bother

If everyone who calls you wants roughly the same thing, one good agent beats three mediocre ones. Routing multiplies how much agent-tuning work you have — every agent needs its own instructions kept current.

A reasonable rule of thumb: add routing when you can point at a specific conversation that's going badly because the agent doesn't know which kind of caller it has.