By default your assistant answers everyone who calls. For most businesses that is exactly right — every call is a potential customer.
Some businesses need the opposite. If your number exists to serve a known set of people — account customers, duty staff at the sites you serve, dispatch contacts at partner companies — then you want your assistant taking orders from those people and nobody else. That is what Authorised callers is for.
What changes when you turn it on
A caller who is not on your list hears a short, polite message in your assistant’s own voice telling them they are not authorised to place an order, and the call ends. No order is taken and no time is spent on it.
If the same unrecognised number calls again within five minutes, they are told that duty personnel will call them back — and you are alerted, so someone can. That covers the case that matters: a real customer calling from a phone you have not added yet, who should not simply be turned away twice.
Everyone on your list carries on exactly as before.
Save your callers as contacts first
Your assistant recognises callers the same way your phone does — by the name your phone shows. So the most useful thing you can do before switching this on is to save your authorised numbers as contacts on the phone you connected.
Do that, and your list reads like your own address book: Northside depot, Apex Supplies, Priya at Riverside Clinic. Your assistant sees the same names you do, and so does anyone reviewing the list later.
If a number is not saved as a contact, your phone shows the number instead — so put the number on the list. That works just as well. Mixed lists are fine, and you can move a number onto a name later by saving the contact.
This is the one step people miss. Nothing prompts you to do it, and a list of names against a phone with no contacts saved will turn away callers you meant to let through.
Building the list
In Settings → Authorised callers, put one entry per line — a name or a number, whichever your phone shows for that caller.
Partial names are enough. Northside will match a contact saved as Northside depot, so you do not have to reproduce your contact names exactly.
You can also reword the two things your assistant says: the message an unrecognised caller hears, and the one a repeat caller hears. The wording that ships is deliberately neutral, but if your operation has a phrase it always uses, use yours.
It stays off until you turn it on
Authorised callers is off on every new account, so nothing blocks you while you are setting up. Turn it on once your list is complete and your contacts are saved — not before, or your own test calls will be the first thing it turns away.
One thing worth being clear about: this decides who your assistant takes orders from. It is not a replacement for the access controls on your own systems.
If you also use RocketReply
RocketReply has the same feature for WhatsApp messages, and it works differently — a call and a message tell us different things about who is on the other end. If you run both, read Choosing who your assistant replies to rather than assuming this article covers it.
