Clara as the Phone System

Why tonight's calls dropped

So welcome, Fede, to today's custom deep dive. We have a really specific mission today, which is unpacking the whole blueprint for Clara as PropFlow's ultimate phone system. Right, because the big picture goal here is to just completely replace RingCentral and all those outside call centers entirely. Exactly.

But before we get to the big picture, we have to talk about tonight. I mean, we had a real-time puzzle with those test calls dropping. Yeah, that was definitely a head scratcher at first. It's basically like a delivery driver throwing a package at a closed door and then just calling it a successful delivery. That is a perfect analogy.

So what happened is we're using Twilio as the underlying engine, right? Right. And Twilio actually counts a call as answered the second a voicemail box picks up, or even if a person just hits decline on their cell phone. Wait, really? Just hitting decline counts as a success? Yeah, it tricked the ring chain. That's the system logic that's supposed to ring one person, then the next, and so on. Oh, I see. So the system just stopped early because it thought it already did its job. Exactly.

The fix: press 1 to accept

So the simple fix here is that the system will now actually require a person to physically press one on their keypad to accept the call. OK, so until they press one, it just treats it as unanswered and keeps moving down the line. That makes total sense. Right.

The Western Slope recording audit

And speaking of missed connections, we should probably talk about the missing audio. Oh, boy. The Western Slope audit. Yeah, let's get into that. So we did a recording audit of real calls at Western Slope recently. And it revealed a pretty massive blind spot. How bad was it?

Well, out of 35 transfers to the call center, zero were recorded. Wait, zero? Like, none of them? Literally zero. Absolute silence. And even on Clara's own leg of the call, only three out of 31 were actually captured. Wow.

The two must-haves

OK, so that directly hits on your two absolute must-haves, Fede. Yeah, first being that we have to record every single leg of a call end to end, including after a transfer. Right. And the second must-have is ensuring staff only use their personal cell phones. So no desk phones, no special proprietary apps, just their own cell. Exactly.

And Fede, I want to reassure you that the recording fixes for both of these issues are being built right now. But there is a catch there, right? There is a catch. They will ship turned off by default. So you will actually have to manually turn them on for a given customer. Good to keep in mind.

Roles, on-call rotation, and using what Twilio already solved

So moving on to the actual target design, if we're just dialing everyone's personal cell phones, how do we prevent total chaos? That is the million dollar question. I mean, you can't just have one giant flat list of people to call. Right, that would be a nightmare. Who even rings first?

So the target design breaks away from that flat list and moves into distinct roles. Like leasing, maintenance, that kind of thing. Yeah, leasing, maintenance, emergency, and then basically an everything else bucket. OK, that organizes it a bit. And each of those roles gets its own ordered list of people to ring, backed by a really simple on-call rotation. Right now, that's just two people who are always on call. With a weekly rotation plan for later, I assume.

And this ties perfectly back to our core engineering philosophy here. We aren't hand rolling all this custom code, are we? Definitely not. PropFlow is using what Twilio and ElevenLabs already solved out of the box. I mean, why reinvent the wheel, right? Exactly. We're relying on proven building blocks. We'll use Twilio sequential dialing and voicemail detection, and later their TaskRouter for all the queuing logic. Which is just smart. Let them do the heavy lifting.

Not yet, and the open question

Now, before we wrap up, let's clarify one thing that is intentionally not happening right now. Oh, right. Branded caller ID. Yeah, getting a customer's actual name, like Situs Group or Western Slope, to actually pop up on a phone screen instead of just a raw number. Yeah, that is not part of this current work. That's slated for a future renewals project down the line. Good to set that expectation.

So we'll end today with an open question for you, Fede. Right, something just to think about, not decide today. When a call is missed, what should the staff member's cell phone show in their missed call log? Should it show Clara's system number or the real caller's actual phone number? It's a tricky one. But we will leave you to ponder that caller ID dilemma. Thanks for joining us for this deep dive. Thank you.