Set up the virtual assistant to answer your phone

It answers calls and texts when nobody else does, and it knows your customers, what they owe and what is on the calendar.

1. Get a number

Settings → Phone number. Type a three digit area code your customers would recognise, press Search, pick one and confirm. It costs about $1.15 a month from the moment you buy it.

The number is bought and wired up in one step. There is nothing to configure afterwards.

2. Write the greeting

Settings → Virtual assistant.

·How it refers to the business — exactly as you would answer the phone. "Acme Plumbing", not "Acme Plumbing LLC".

·What it says first — the greeting. This is required: it will not switch on without one, because the first sentence a stranger hears is the whole first impression and a default written by us would be somebody else's words in your mouth.

·How you want things handled — your own rules, in your own words. "We do not do same-day work." "Always offer a callback for quotes over $5,000."

3. Say where things go

·Send messages it takes to — an email address. Messages can wait.

·Put callers through to — a phone number. Somebody on the line cannot wait. Use a number that is NOT the one you forward, or the call comes straight back to us and loops.

4. Choose what it may do

Three permissions, all off except taking a message. They are the three where being wrong is fixable: a wrongly booked slot is moved, a wrongly sent link is ignored. Nothing that moves money or changes a document is on the list.

5. Switch it on

Tick Let it answer and save. Then call the number yourself before you send a single customer to it.

Then forward your real line

Your customers keep calling the number they already know. See Forward your business line to the assistant.