Troubleshooting

Most problems fall into one of a handful of buckets. Start with the transcript in Calls — it usually tells you exactly what happened.

Calls aren’t reaching the AI

Symptom: callers get your voicemail, or a dead line, and nothing shows up under Calls.

• Check the forwarding. Call your business number from another phone and let it ring through. If it lands on your voicemail rather than the AI, forwarding isn’t active. Re-apply your carrier’s forwarding setting.
• Check which forwarding you set. Conditional forwarding only fires when you don’t answer, are busy, or are unreachable — if your phone is on and you decline the call quickly, some carriers won’t forward.
• Call the StrandCalls number directly. If that reaches the AI, the problem is forwarding, not StrandCalls.

The AI offers times I’m not available

Availability is computed, not guessed — so a wrong offer means an input is wrong.

• Business hours (Settings → Business Profile) — check the day of week and the timezone.
• Time blocks — vacations and standing commitments need to be blocked on the Calendar, not just in your head.
• Service duration — if a job is set to 30 minutes but really takes two hours, you’ll get back-to-back bookings that can’t work. Fix the duration in Services & prices.
• Google Calendar — StrandCalls books against its own calendar. Events you create only in Google are not blocking time unless the sync covers them.

See Scheduling.

The AI won’t quote a price

This is working as designed. The AI quotes only from your service catalog, so:

• No catalog entry for that job → it declines to quote and offers a callback. Add the service.
• Quote policy is “Never” on that service → same behavior, intentionally.
• You’re on Core → catalog quoting is a Pro feature. See Plans and billing.

No custom instruction will make it produce a number it doesn’t have. That’s the guardrail, not a bug.

Texts aren’t arriving

• Check A2P status in Settings → Messaging. Until registration is Approved, throughput is reduced and messages may be slow or dropped. See A2P registration.
• Check the toggle for the specific notification — missed-call text-back, morning briefing, reminders, and review requests are each separately enabled.
• Missed-call text-back looks like it skipped one? Repeat sends to the same number are suppressed for an hour, so a customer who redials three times gets one text.
• Voice is unaffected by SMS problems. Answering and booking keep working regardless of registration status.

I’m not getting the morning briefing

It sends at 7am in your local time to accounts that have opted in, so check your timezone in Settings → Business Profile as well as the toggle in Settings → Messaging.

I missed an emergency dispatch

• Check the dispatch alert phone in Settings → Emergency Dispatch — urgent pages can go to a different number than your main one.
• Check the offer timeout. If it’s short, the job may have moved to your backup contact before you got to your phone.
• Look at Dispatches for the state history: offered, accepted, en route, declined, expired, unreachable, or done.
• If nobody accepted, the dispatch is marked unreachable and escalation alerts repeat until acknowledged with ACK.

See Emergency dispatch.

The AI said something I don’t like

Read the transcript, then add a custom instruction covering that exact situation. This is the intended loop — the receptionist gets better because you correct it from real calls, not because you anticipated everything up front.

If the AI said something unsafe or stated a price or ETA it shouldn’t have, that’s not a tuning issue — tell support.

A test call behaved strangely

If you called from a number on your Recognized phones list, you were being offered owner assistant mode, not the customer experience. Test from a different phone.

Still stuck

Contact support. Having the call’s date and time (or the caller’s number) makes it much faster to find the transcript.