The receptionist that never
gives an engaged tone.

fonea starts at £90 per month and includes 120 minutes of call time, with no per-call fees, no setup fee, and no minimum term — cancel monthly. For comparison, even a part-time human receptionist typically costs well over £1,000 a month in wages alone, and out-of-hours cover from a traditional answering service is billed on top.

It does the job a call handling service does, without the call centre behind it. fonea picks up in seconds, greets callers with your business name, handles the questions you get every day, books appointments into your calendar and puts urgent callers through to you, then sends you a written summary of the call. The two differences a UK buyer notices are the bill and the wait: one flat monthly price instead of a per-call or per-minute rate, and nobody sitting in a queue behind another company’s caller at nine on a Monday morning.

A telephone answering service is people taking messages, usually shared across many businesses and charged per call. The message reaches you afterwards, and the caller still has to be rung back. fonea finishes the job on the call itself: it answers your frequently asked questions from your own information, books the appointment against live calendar availability, and transfers the caller straight to you when the reason is urgent. Where it cannot help, it takes a structured message rather than inventing an answer, which is the one thing a good human message-taker also does.

For the phone side of it, yes. A virtual PA service usually bundles call answering with diary and admin work done by a person. fonea takes the calls: answering, qualifying, booking into your calendar and passing urgent callers through, around the clock, at a flat monthly price rather than an hourly one. What it does not do is the human admin around the edges, so businesses that need someone chasing invoices or drafting letters keep a person for that and hand fonea the phone, which is usually the part that was interrupting the work.

Yes. Your assistant is set up on its own UK number on the +44 range, live once the assistant is configured, which is usually a matter of hours rather than weeks. Most businesses keep publishing their existing number and divert it to the fonea number so nothing on the van or the website has to change. Others publish the fonea number directly as an out of hours or overflow line. You can start with one approach and move to the other without losing anything.

Yes. fonea works through standard call divert, which every UK provider supports on landlines, VoIP lines, and mobiles. You keep your existing number — there is no porting and no new contract — and you choose whether calls divert always, when busy, or when unanswered. Switching the divert off again takes seconds.

Yes, at no extra charge. fonea answers around the clock, every day of the year, including the bank holiday weekends when emergencies happen and human cover is hardest to arrange. Many UK businesses run their own phone in office hours and use fonea as an out of hours call answering service; others divert everything and take the calls back only when they choose to.

Compliance is something you hold as the controller, so the useful answer is what fonea gives you to hold it with. Calls are processed under the UK GDPR and the Data Protection Act 2018 with a data processing agreement, encryption in transit and at rest, named sub-processors, and retention windows you set with deletion on request. AI processing runs on European infrastructure and persistent data is stored in Switzerland, which the UK recognises as adequate. Callers are told at the start of every call that they are speaking with a digital assistant, no voice profiles are created, and recording is a switch you control. Those are the points the ICO expects you to be able to evidence about any supplier that touches caller data.

By default, yes. Storing call recordings is governed by two switches, a master for the business and one per assistant, and both are on when you start. Turning either off stops the audio being stored, from the next call, as a checkbox in your dashboard rather than a support request. Transcripts and summaries are separate and keep working either way. While recording is on you are keeping caller audio, so UK expectations apply in full: callers have to be told, you need a lawful basis for keeping it under UK GDPR, and you should not hold it longer than you can justify. If you would rather not hold caller audio at all, switch it off before you go live.

Any business that loses calls because the people who could answer are busy doing the work: trades and home services, dental and other private practices, law firms, estate and letting agents, salons and clinics. fonea is configured with your services, prices, and frequent questions, so it answers like your front desk — not like a generic call centre.

You define what counts as urgent for your business — a water leak, severe dental pain, a completion-day issue. When a caller describes one, fonea puts them through to your mobile immediately; if you don’t pick up, it captures the details and flags the message for a priority call-back. Routine calls are booked or summarised instead, so your phone only interrupts you when it should.