AI phone for multi-location businesses

Why one shared phone setup breaks down with many sites

Most multi-site businesses do not start with a plan. A phone system grows one branch at a time, branch five has a different greeting from branch two, and the cost is not the phone bill but the inconsistency. A caller who gets no answer from one site thinks of the whole brand as the one that never picks up.

The usual fixes each have a catch:

• One central number for everyone. Easy to run, but callers want the branch near them, and a central desk has to know every site's hours and every site's staff.
• A separate answering service per site. Each branch gets what it needs, but you end up with many contracts, many invoices and no combined picture.
• Leaving it to whoever is on the front desk. Fine until the front desk is with a customer, at lunch, or closed.

A multi-location AI phone setup takes the useful part of each. Every site is answered, every site is configured separately, and the management of it all sits in one account.

How each location is set up

Think of a location as a line with its own settings. Everything below is set per location, not once for the whole company.

Its own number

Each location has a local number in the country it operates in. We offer local numbers in New Zealand, Australia, the United States, the United Kingdom and Canada. A company with branches in more than one of those countries can hold a local number in each.

Its own business details

The AI learns each business from its website. For a location, that means pointing it at the page for that site, or at that site's own website if it has one. It reads what is there, such as services, address, contact details and common questions, and builds the answers from it. You can review and correct what it learned before anyone calls.

This matters for multi-site businesses because the answers differ. The address differs. The opening hours may differ. One branch might offer a service that another does not. A single shared description of the company would get half of these wrong.

Its own hours

Each location has its own opening hours. Outside them, the AI still answers, because it answers every call, all day and night. What changes is what it does: during opening hours it might put a call through to the front desk, and after hours it might take a message or book a visit for the next day.

Its own people to put calls through to

Each location has its own list of people the AI can transfer a call to. That could be the front desk of that branch, the duty manager, or an on-call technician. If the call is for sales, it can go to one person. If it is for service, another.

Transfers go to a person. The AI does not pretend to be one, and it tells every caller it is an AI at the start of each call.

What the AI does on every call, at every location

The behaviour is the same wherever the call lands:

• It answers every call, 24 hours a day, and says at the start that it is an AI.
• It answers questions from what it learned about that location.
• It books appointments into Google Calendar during the call, after checking the real free times.
• It puts the caller through to a person, or takes a message with details and emails it.
• It marks urgent calls, so a burst pipe or a stalled vehicle is not buried behind a routine enquiry.

Every call is recorded and transcribed, with a summary.

One view of every call

The part that changes the most for a head office is visibility. Calls from every location land in one account, and you can open any of them: the recording, the transcript, the summary and what the AI did.

That makes some questions easy to answer that used to take a phone round of the branches: which locations get the most calls and when, which calls were marked urgent this week, and what callers keep asking that the AI could not answer. Those gaps are usually missing information on a website. Because it is the same platform for every site, you are comparing like with like.

One invoice

On a postpaid AI phone plan, you use the service all month and are billed afterwards. The usage across all your lines is added up and appears on one invoice for the month. You do not pay a bill per site, and you do not top up anything at each branch.

For a head office, this is often the deciding factor. A finance team usually prefers one document it can approve, code and file, rather than a stack of card charges that each need matching to a branch. We cover how the invoice works on our blog.

Postpaid is invitation-only. We do not publish prices on this site, because they depend on the shape of the account, and we agree the terms with you when the account is opened.

What it does not replace

It is worth being straightforward about the edges, so you can plan around them.

• It answers calls to numbers we provide. It is not a way of forwarding an existing number.
• It works from what it learned and what you have set up. If a website is out of date, the AI will be out of date until you fix the source.

Who this is built for

It suits a shape more than an industry: clinics and salons with several sites, franchises where each unit runs separately but the brand wants consistency, trades companies with depots, and fleets with many numbers under one account.

If you run a handful of lines and pay by card, the prepaid side of our platform may be simpler, and it is open to anyone. The postpaid side exists for the point where one invoice and one account for many lines becomes the easier way to run it.

How to get started

postpaid.ai is invitation-only. You request access, and our team gets in touch to understand how many locations you have, where they are and how you want to be invoiced. Then we open the account with you.

1. Request access at app.postpaid.ai.
2. Tell us about your sites: where they are and how many lines you expect.
3. We open the account and you set up the first location.
4. Add the others, checking each one's details, hours and transfer people.

If you would like to talk first, use the contact page. To see what postpaid.ai is, start at the home page.

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