Problem
A business that already has front-desk staff it trusts doesn’t need them replaced. It needs the gaps covered: the call that rang out at lunch, the text that came in after hours, the email nobody saw until Monday. An AI-first front desk is the wrong product for them. An overflow layer is the right one.
System
Twilio rings the humans for 18 seconds. On no answer, busy, or out-of-hours, RingRelay answers. Every call opens with a disclosure that it’s an automated assistant, then runs deterministic escalation rules before any knowledge answer: asked for a person, any health mention, a complaint or refund, anything already escalated. Escalation tries a transfer, then takes a message if that rings out. Every call, without exception, ends with the transcript and recording delivered to staff.
Worth knowing
The escalation rules are graph edges, not prompt instructions: a pure function over call state that decides the route before the model gets to phrase anything. “Any health mention” escalates in a clinic whether or not the model thought it was handling it fine. That’s the difference between something a clinic owner can deploy and something they’d be nervous about, and it’s also what makes the behaviour testable without a model in the loop.