Phone calls are where the business happens and the least gets recorded
So we built the record-keeping half first and the telephony second. That is backwards from how phone systems are usually built, and it means you cannot buy this yet, but the half that exists is the half that was missing.
· 2 min read
A sales team makes forty calls a day. Afterwards, the CRM contains: nothing. Perhaps a note, if somebody was diligent, written twenty minutes later from memory. The single richest source of information about your customers evaporates as it is produced.
Meanwhile the phone system knows precisely who called whom, when, and for how long. It just has no idea who any of those numbers are, because it is a different system with a different notion of a contact.
We built it in the unusual order
The normal way to build a phone product is telephony first (trunks, routing, queues, voicemail) and integrations afterwards, because telephony is the hard, expensive, obviously-valuable part.
We did the opposite, and the reasoning is simple: the telephony half is well served by the market and the record-keeping half is not. So what exists today is number inventory, click-to-call from any customer or ticket, consented recording references, and the call ledger writing to the customer timeline.
And one application is deliberately last
Voice campaigns (outbound calling with audiences from the CRM, a dialling strategy, and per-call outcomes written back) is the fourth application and it is last on purpose.
Outbound calling carries legal requirements that differ by market: consent regimes, calling windows, do-not-call registries, disclosure rules. An AI voice agent carries more of them, and several jurisdictions are still deciding what those are. Shipping a dialler early is how a software company gets its customers fined.
The order you build things in is a statement about who carries the risk if you get it wrong.
One app, three surfaces
Calls, Chat and Meet share a single front end: the Rutba Comms application. Licensing any of them gives your team the same app with the surfaces they are entitled to, so a phone rollout later is not a second deployment.
| Plan | Price | What it is for |
|---|---|---|
| Starter | $6 per user / month | Business numbers for the team. |
| Business | $13 per user / month | A real phone desk, logged to your CRM. |
| Enterprise | Custom, annual | Contact-centre scale. |
Rutba Calls
The four applications with their real state, and what the call ledger records today.
See the productIn this post
- Rutba CallsThe phone system that logs the call
- Inside ChatChannels, DMs, and record threads. Chat is one of the three surfaces in the Rutba Comms app, alongside Meet and Calls. Part of Rutba Chat.
- Inside DeskphoneThe screen somebody taking calls lives in all day: the call ringing, who is calling and what Rutba already knows about them, answer, hold, transfer, and the wrap-up that turns a finished call into a disposition on the record. Part of Rutba Calls.
- Inside SwitchboardThe administrator’s side: DIDs and trunks, inbound routes, business hours, IVR menus, queues, extensions, and the recording and retention policy over all of it. Part of Rutba Calls.
