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 — if it’s connected, its busy time is subtracted from availability. If it isn’t connected, events living only in Google are invisible to StrandCalls; connect it in Settings → Integrations.
• Zone days — with a zone policy set to enforce, a caller in that zone is only offered its route days and days you already have work there. That can look like “no availability” on a wide-open week.
• Reserved plan slots — membership tiers hold back the last slots of each day for members.

See Scheduling.

The AI won’t quote a price

This is working as designed. The AI reads prices from tables you fill in and never generates one, so:

• No catalog entry for that job → it declines to quote and offers a callback. Add the service in Services & prices.
• Quote policy is “Never” on that service → same behavior, intentionally.
• The service has variants and the caller hasn’t said which one applies → it asks rather than picking one. Give the rows distinct subject classes.
• An emergency minimum charge isn’t set for that job type and time band → it dispatches without quoting anything. Fill the table in Settings → Emergency Dispatch.

Quoting is available on every plan; there is nothing to upgrade. And no custom instruction will make the AI 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, missed-call text-back, review requests, and campaigns are not sent at all — this is a gate, not a slowdown. See what approval unlocks.
• Check the toggle for the specific notification — missed-call text-back, morning briefing, reminders, and review requests are each separately enabled.
• Check the customer’s record. A Texts blocked badge in Callers means they texted STOP, and the carrier is blocking everything to that number — confirmations and reminders included, not just marketing. Only they can undo it.
• Check the transcript. If the caller declined the texting consent question, the booking carries a NO SMS — caller declined note and nothing was sent on purpose.
• 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.

My campaign has no recipients

Campaigns can only reach customers who explicitly opted in to marketing on a recorded call. Nobody is eligible by virtue of being a customer, and there’s no import path — a new account starts at zero and builds the list one booked call at a time. Run Preview to see the count.

If the audience looks right but nothing sends, check that your A2P registration is approved for a marketing or mixed use case; a transactional-only registration blocks campaigns while letting confirmations through. See Campaigns & plans.

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 → Safety & Escalation — urgent pages can go to a different number than your main one.
• Work out which mode you’re in. Alert-and-acknowledge is the default and expects ACK; the accept/pass/ETA loop only runs if you switched it on in Settings → Emergency Dispatch.
• In the loop: check the offer timeout. If it’s short, the job may have moved to your backup contact before you got to your phone — and after the backup there is no third leg, so it ends as declined or expired.
• In the default mode: two re-alerts go out on your escalation window (10 minutes unless you changed it), and after those the dispatch goes unreachable with an email to you. It doesn’t alert forever.
• Look at Dispatches for the state history either way.

My dispatch reply didn’t register

• Reply from the phone the offer went to. A reply from any other number is treated as an ordinary customer text.
• ETAs must be 3 to 480 minutes. 1 and 2 always mean accept and pass, so a one- or two-minute ETA can’t be expressed; anything above 480 is ignored.
• DONE only closes a job you accepted, and 1 only accepts a job that is still open — if your backup already took it, you’ll be told it was handled.

See Emergency dispatch.

I’m locked out of the owner assistant

Three wrong PIN attempts end the call, and a correct PIN after that won’t be accepted on that call. Ten attempts in an hour locks verification for a while — wait it out. If you’ve forgotten the PIN, set a new one in Settings → AI Receptionist; the old one is never displayed, only replaced.

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

The caller was transferred and nobody answered

The transfer rings your contact for 30 seconds, once, with no rollover. If it isn’t picked up the caller hears an apology and a promise of a callback, and the call is marked transfer failed in Calls. Repeated failures usually mean the transfer target is the wrong number — or that you’d be better off with no transfer contact at all, so the AI takes a detailed message instead. See Transfers and contacts.

Still stuck

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