How voicemail works

Voicemail is what catches the calls you can’t take. It’s on by default, and it’s the reason a missed call still turns into something you can act on.

When a caller reaches it

Three ways, all covered in how a call reaches you:

1. You were closed — outside your business hours, or on a holiday. Your phone never rang.
2. You didn’t accept a screened call — screening is on and you didn’t press a key within about 10 seconds.
3. Your phone didn’t answer — nobody picked up within about 15 seconds of ringing.

A paused line is different: when you’ve reached your spending cap or aren’t on a plan, callers hear a short message asking them to try again later and the call ends — no voicemail is taken. See how a call reaches you.

What the caller hears

Your greeting, then a beep, then they talk — for up to two minutes. A caller who hangs up before the beep leaves nothing behind.

Out of the box the greeting is a synthesised voice saying:

“[Your store] is unable to take your call right now. Please leave a message after the beep.” It’s perfectly serviceable, and it’s obviously a robot — which is why recording your own is worth ten minutes.

What happens to the message

The moment they hang up:

1. The recording is saved to your voicemail inbox and marked New.
2. It’s transcribed — written out as text — so you can read it instead of playing it. This takes a moment; until it’s done the entry says “No transcription yet.”
3. The call also appears in your call history, marked Missed, with the voicemail attached to its detail page.

That transcript is the real point. Skimming ten written messages takes about as long as listening to one.

Transcripts leave out sensitive details: phone numbers, email addresses, card and bank numbers, government ID numbers and passwords are always redacted. So if a caller reads out a callback number, play the audio to hear it. Names are redacted too, unless you’ve allowed customer access in Settings → Customer access.

Voicemails are kept for as long as your plan’s retention — 1 year on Lite, 3 years on Starter, 10 years on Growth. After that, the audio and transcript are deleted; see how long recordings are kept.

Turning voicemail off

Settings → Voicemail, untick Enable voicemail, then press Save.

Think about what this actually means before you do. With voicemail off, a caller who rings while you’re closed hears:

“We’re sorry, we’re currently closed. Please call back during our business hours.”

…and the call ends. A caller who rings while you’re open but doesn’t get an answer isn’t told anything — the call just ends. They can’t leave a message, and you have no record of what they wanted — just a missed call in your history with a number on it.

That’s occasionally the right choice, if you’d rather people called back than left messages you won’t return. Mostly it isn’t.

Caution

If voicemail is off and every day of your schedule is Closed, nobody can reach you at all — every caller hears the closed message and hangs up. Callify warns you about this on the business hours page.

Voicemail and call recording are different things

They’re easy to confuse because both produce audio with a transcript.

	Voicemail	Call recording
What it is	A message left for you	A conversation you had
When	Nobody answered	You answered
Where it appears	Voicemails inbox	The call’s detail page
Controlled by	Enable voicemail	Record answered calls
Announcement	Your greeting, then a beep	“This call may be recorded…”

Turning call recording off doesn’t affect voicemail. Callers can still leave messages, and those are still recorded and transcribed.