One number. Different people behind it.
A phone system is organised around the number: it rings, and something has to decide who picks it up. So the first question is who sits behind that number, and what has to be true for each of them when a call arrives. Four answers below, each one a queue you name and give rules to.
The second question is headcount, because it changes which parts you use rather than how much of them you get. All 28 block types are on the canvas at every price. What changes with size is how many queues you need, how many people can be on a call at once, and whether anybody is watching the reporting on a Monday morning.
How queues workNamed queues, drawn the way the product names them. Membership follows from what each person is set up to handle, not from a list somebody keeps by hand.
By team
Built around who picks up.
Four teams behind one published line, each with rules of its own. None of them needs a second phone number, and none of them needs a second product.
Sales
A priority-one queue, so a buying call jumps the line.
Priority is a number on the queue, and a higher one is offered to whoever is free before anything else waiting. When every seller is genuinely busy, the in-queue flow can offer a callback instead of more hold music: the caller hangs up and gets rung back rather than deciding how long they are prepared to wait.
Support
Required skills on the queue, so a tier-two question is never offered to somebody who cannot answer it.
Every skill named on a queue has to be on the person for a call from it to reach them at all, which is what turns a skill from a label into routing. The queue also carries a maximum wait, and when it runs out the flow takes its overflow branch: another queue, a voicemail, or a message that says what to do instead.
Billing
Its own hours, its own recording rule and its own queue, on the same number as everyone else.
Hours are checked inside the flow rather than on the number, so billing can close at four while support stays open until six, and each branch says something different. Recording is decided for the organization: always, the agent’s choice, or never, plus whether an agent may stop one that is running. Playing a recording back is a separate permission from making one.
Front desk
One menu, an extension for everybody, and a warm handoff where you stay on the line to introduce the caller.
Extensions are three to six digits, unique inside your organization, and dialling one never touches the phone network, so it costs nothing and never lands on your minutes. A consult transfer keeps you on the line with the colleague first, then with all three of you, then drops you out. It is the same mechanism as hold and as a three-way call, which is why it behaves the same way every time.
By size
And how many of you there are.
Headcount decides which parts you use and which plan they arrive on. Prices are per seat, per month, in USD, and each plan carries a seat limit rather than a seat minimum: the smallest number you can buy is one.
1 to 10 people
Everybody answers everything.
One number, one queue, and a menu short enough that nobody resents it. There is nothing to route between yet, so the work is your hours, your voicemail and what a caller hears at seven in the evening.
Starter, $29 per seat per month. Up to 5 seats.
10 to 50 people
Teams that answer different things.
The point where a second queue appears, and with it priorities, required skills and a different set of hours per team. It is also where recording starts to matter, which is why it is on from this plan up.
Pro, $49 per seat per month. Up to 25 seats.
50 and up
A floor, and the numbers to feed it.
Enough people answering at once that concurrency and how many numbers you hold both matter, and enough calls that service level, answer rate and an hourly heatmap are how you staff the week rather than how you report on it afterwards.
Business, $79 per seat per month. Up to 100 seats.
A phone system, not a contact centre.
The difference is not company size and it is not vocabulary. A contact centre is organised around a workforce: people whose whole day is the queue, and a plan for how many of them are on it at four in the afternoon. A phone system is organised around the number, for the case where one line is answered by more than one team and the person answering has other work the rest of the day.
Being the second kind does not mean a thinner queue. Skills-based routing, service level reporting and the queues themselves are in the base product here, on every plan. Most of this category puts them in a second product with its own price and its own seat minimum, where the floor is three seats and in places fifty. There is no floor here at all.
What is genuinely not here is the workforce half: nothing forecasts how many people you will need at four on a Thursday, nothing builds the shift plan that follows from it, and nothing scores a call afterwards. If those are what you are shopping for, this is the wrong product and I will say so on the first call.