Twilio
- Our own main line
- British English voice
- Voicemail by text
Twilio runs our main phone line. It owns the numbers, speaks the menu, listens for the key the caller presses, records voicemail and sends the texts.
- 3menu options on our line
- 15seconds of ringing before voicemail
- 2minutes a voicemail can run
- 1build on it
What we use it for
One place for the line
The numbers, the voice, the keypad menu and the voicemail recordings all sit in Twilio, so there is one account to look at when a call goes wrong.
Logic we can change
The menu is a few small functions. Hours, wording and routes are settings, so we change them ourselves without asking anyone.
Transcripts in the CRM
AI calls and voicemails are transcribed (ElevenLabs and Scribe), so voicemail transcripts and AI call summaries land in Twenty and nothing gets lost.
A text on request
Callers who only want the website press 3 and get a text with the link, and the call ends.
Twilio answers Pacing's own main line. We wrote the phone menu ourselves as a handful of small Node.js functions on Twilio Functions, and we run it on our own number. The full story is on the phone line build page.
What it does for us
- Owns the phone numbers and sends each incoming call to our menu.
- Speaks the menu in a British English voice and listens for a keypad press (1, 2 or 3).
- Forwards calls. Monday to Friday, 10am to 5pm UK time, option 1 rings a team phone. Whoever answers hears "Call from the Pacing Agency main line" first, and the caller doesn't.
- Takes voicemail. If nobody answers within about 15 seconds, or it's out of hours, the caller can leave a message of up to two minutes. We get a text with a link to a page that plays it on a phone, then a second text with a Scribe transcript through n8n, and the transcript lands in Twenty with the call record.
- Sends the website text for callers who press 3.
- Handles texts to the main line and our tracking numbers: each message is forwarded to us, and the sender gets one auto-reply per 24 hours with the line and website.
- Feeds the CRM. Twilio events become call records in Twenty (outcome, voicemail, AI summary and attribution).
What stays outside Twilio
Option 2 passes the call to an ElevenLabs voice agent (Claude Haiku 5.5). Its prompt and settings live in our phone-system repo and are pushed to ElevenLabs with a deploy script; the voice is a stock ElevenLabs voice. It reads knowledge from the live site, re-fetched daily, records and transcribes every call in ElevenLabs, collects callback details, texts us a summary, and writes the summary and caller details into Twenty. It can run a conference transfer back to the main line so the caller hears the menu again and presses 1 for a person. Calls answered by a person on option 1 are not recorded. The menu hides option 2 during an ElevenLabs Telephony or Conversations outage, and a failed AI dial falls back to the option 1 route.
Settings, not code
The wording of every prompt, the opening hours, the time zone, the numbers and the ring time are settings. Changing the hours or a line of the menu is a settings change and a redeploy.
No staging copy
There is no staging copy of the line, so a deploy goes straight to the live number. Changes are checked for syntax before they merge, and nothing deploys without a person choosing to.
What we connect it to
Twilio carries the calls and texts, but it doesn't decide what the menu says or where each option goes. That's code and settings we wrote ourselves.
Services that use it
We don't sell it on its own. Each of these services uses it alongside the rest of your setup.
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