Call screening for a business phone

Call screening means something answers a call before you do and finds out who's on the line. Then it decides what happens next: ring you, take a message, or end the call. Your phone may already do a version of this for numbers you haven't saved. A call screening service for a business has the same job with one extra duty. The stranger on the line might be your next customer, so the screen has to be easy for a real person to get through and a dead end for a recording.

Call screening service and number screening: what each means

A call screening service is that job sold for a business line. Some put a person on it, which makes them an answering service; ours is automated, with an AI model reading what each caller says.

Number screening is the other half of the job. It sorts a call by the phone number alone: a block list, an allowed list, a spam database or your saved contacts decides whether the call is blocked, labeled or put through. Carriers offer versions of it, free and paid. AT&T ActiveArmor comes with every AT&T wireless plan, and Verizon's free Call Filter lets you keep a personal allowed list of numbers it won't block, with a personal block list added in the paid Call Filter Plus. What a number can't tell you is whether a first-time caller is a customer or a spammer, because both are strangers to every list.

We do both, in order: the number checks run first, and screening is for every caller they leave over. The steps below give the full order.

Screening, blocking and labeling are different jobs

The three words get used loosely, but they work differently, and the difference shows up when the call is from someone you've never talked to.

• Blocking stops a number from reaching you at all. It only works on numbers somebody has already decided are bad.
• Labeling lets the call ring but puts a warning on the screen, like "Scam Likely" or "Potential Spam." Carriers do this on their networks.
• Screening answers the call and asks the caller something before you decide. Of the three, it's the one that gives a brand-new caller a way to show they're a person.

VettedCalls blocks numbers you've marked as spam and numbers on a spam registry shared by every VettedCalls customer. Saved contacts and recent callers skip ahead, and everyone else gets screened.

How call screening works on VettedCalls

This is the path a call takes, start to finish. Your plan doesn't change any of it until the very last step.

1. Your cell forwards the call to us. When you sign up, we give your account its own VettedCalls number in your area code. You dial your carrier's forwarding code from your phone's regular dialer, and from then on every call to your cell goes there first. You keep your number, and the cell itself shouldn't ring.
2. We check who it is. In this order: numbers you've marked as spam, any blocking rules you've turned on for callers outside the US or for particular area codes, callers who passed screening in the last 60 days, your saved contacts, anyone who finished screening, left a voicemail or texted your VettedCalls number in the last 4 hours, and the shared spam registry. A blocked number hears "This number does not accept unsolicited calls. Goodbye." Recent callers and saved contacts skip the rest of screening.
3. Everyone else hears your business name. "Thanks for calling [your business]. Who's calling, and how can we help today?" The caller has 4 seconds to start talking.
4. An AI model reads what they said. It pulls out their name, a short topic, whether they said one of your priority words, and whether the call sounds like spam. It's told to treat a human-sounding caller as a person when in doubt, and if the AI can't be reached, the caller is treated as a person too.
5. The caller presses 1 or 2. They hear a short notice about text messages and choose: 1 to connect and get texts about their inquiry, 2 to connect without texts. A caller the AI suspected, or one who said nothing, gets the same choice. No key press ends the call.
6. Priority calls ring you right away. Priority Passthrough lets customers who say one of your selected priority words ring straight through to you, regardless of the time of day. They skip the text question and your phone rings for up to 40 seconds, on every plan.
7. Your phone rings in the Cloud Softphone app. You see the caller's number. When you answer, you hear their name and reason read aloud, then a beep, and then you're connected.
8. If you miss it, the plan decides. On Pro, your phone rings for up to 25 seconds and then the caller can leave a voicemail. On Receptionist (coming soon), a missed call goes to the AI receptionist, except priority calls and saved contacts, which go to voicemail.

What happens to a robocaller

A robocall plays its recording and never presses a key, so it gets as far as the press 1 or 2 question and the call ends there. What happens to the number afterward depends on how it got that far. If it stayed silent, or the AI judged it as spam, and then it didn't press, it picks up one flag on our shared spam registry. A caller who spoke normally and just didn't press gets no flag.

The registry is one list across every VettedCalls customer. A number with 10 counted flags is blocked for all of them, and one account's flags count at most once every 24 hours. Entries expire after 30 days, and every call from a blocked number restarts the 30 days. If a real customer ever lands on it, text UNBLOCK and their number from your cell to your VettedCalls number and they're off the list.

Each of those calls still counts toward your minutes, the way every call we answer does. A blocked robocall usually ends inside a minute, so it uses one.

Built-in screening, a carrier filter, or VettedCalls

You may already have some screening on your phone or your plan. Here's how the options line up. The iPhone and Pixel columns come from Apple's and Google's own help pages, and the carrier column from AT&T, T-Mobile and Verizon.

Swipe the table sideways to see every column.

The screening built into an iPhone or a Pixel is a sensible place to start for a personal phone. It's already there, and Google's version hangs up on calls it decides are spam. Both decide who gets screened by whether the number is saved in that phone's contacts.

A carrier filter acts before your phone rings. That keeps junk off your screen, and it also means a call you wanted can be stopped before it reaches you. T-Mobile's small business page says turning on Scam Block might block calls you want, and AT&T says ActiveArmor may block wanted calls too.

VettedCalls is set up for a phone that belongs to a business. The caller hears your business name, a stranger gets through by answering and pressing 1 or 2, and priority words ring you on every plan. One detail if you use a Pixel: Google's help page says not to use automatic call screening together with call forwarding, because screened calls won't be forwarded. With VettedCalls, every call forwards to us and your cell shouldn't ring, so the screening happens on our side.

Call screening for business: who it suits

Screening earns its keep on a phone that strangers are supposed to call, like a contractor's cell on a yard sign or an agent's number on a listing. It does less for a phone where almost every caller is already a saved contact, since saved contacts skip screening anyway.

A contractor also needs the screen to let the urgent job through. A homeowner with a burst pipe shouldn't have to stop at a question about texts, and with priority words they don't. Your priority words are six universal ones (urgent, emergency, help, asap, right now and today) plus defaults for your trade, and you can add up to 20 of your own. Our pages for plumbers, HVAC technicians, roofers, electricians and general contractors cover how priority calls work for each trade.

Pick the plan by what should happen when you can't answer:

• Pro, $29.99 a month: screening, the shared spam registry, Priority Passthrough, voicemail with transcripts, and missed-call texts to callers who pressed 1. A missed call goes to voicemail.
• Receptionist (coming soon), $99.99 a month: all of that, plus an AI receptionist that picks up calls you don't answer and, after hours, takes callers who pass screening (priority calls and saved contacts you miss still go to voicemail), recorded calls with transcripts, and a 7am text summarizing yesterday's calls.
• Team answering is an add-on to Pro. Add up to 4 more people for $10 a month each. Everyone's phone rings together and you share the minutes.

Every plan has a 14-day money-back guarantee. Minutes, overage rates and annual prices are on the pricing page.

AI call screening or an answering service?

Screening decides who reaches you. An answering service talks to callers for you. They solve different problems, and some owners only need the first. If you'd rather take every real call yourself and call back the ones you miss, screening on its own is enough, and that's Pro.

If calls you can't take are costing you work, read our answering service page, or the one on after-hours answering if the trouble is nights and weekends. On VettedCalls, screening runs first on every plan; the plan only changes where a call goes after it passes, whether that's you, the AI receptionist, or voicemail.

Setting up the screening

Setup happens on your phone, in four steps. Install the free Cloud Softphone app from the App Store or Google Play. Open our welcome email on the phone and tap Activate VettedCalls; the app sets itself up with nothing to type. Allow the permissions it asks for. Then dial your carrier's forwarding code from the regular dialer.

On most carriers the code is **21*, your VettedCalls number, and #. On Verizon and carriers that run on Verizon it's *72 and the number. ##21# or *73 turns forwarding off. Our setup page covers 16 carriers, and some MVNO and prepaid plans can't forward calls at all. If yours can't, you get a full refund within the first 14 days. The forwarding codes by carrier guide has each carrier's details, and the setup guide walks through the phone settings.

Screening on the phone you already have

Want to see what your phone does on its own first? These guides go through each one's built-in screening, step by step:

• iPhone call screening
• Android call screening
• Samsung call screening
• Google call screening
• Google Voice call screening

If screening is already switched on and you want it off, our guide to turning off call screening on iPhone has the steps. And if what you're seeing is a label instead of a screen, what a Potential Spam label means and what a Spam Risk call means cover what to do about each, including what a business can do when its own number gets one.

What comes with it

Screening is where every call starts, and the rest of the product picks up from there. Each voicemail sends you a text alert and an email with the full transcript. On Pro, callers who pressed 1 get a missed-call text from you when you can't pick up. On Receptionist (coming soon), connected calls are recorded by default after the caller hears a notice, and each one gets a transcript and a short summary.

See all features, or go straight to voicemail to text, missed-call text back, call recording, call transcripts or the AI auto attendant. The AI has instructions written for 58 trades and professions; browse our industry pages for yours.

Frequently asked questions