Where should call alerts go?
Every call can reach you by email, text or WhatsApp. The temptation is to send everything everywhere, which works for about four days and then gets muted — at which point you are missing calls again, only now you are paying for it.
What each channel is actually for
The default, and right for almost everything. It holds detail, it is searchable months later, and nobody feels obliged to react to it at nine at night.
For the small number of calls you would want to be interrupted for. Its value is entirely that it interrupts, which it stops doing the moment it arrives forty times a day.
Useful where your team already lives in it, and where you want alerts on a phone without them mixing into personal texts.
The mistake almost everyone makes first
Sending every call by text. Day one it feels responsive. By the end of the week the tone is the same for a booking confirmation and a burst pipe, so you stop looking — and an alert you no longer read is worse than one you never set up, because you believe you are covered.
A split that holds up
Everything by email, and only the urgent by text. That way the record is complete and searchable, while your phone buzzes for the things that genuinely cannot wait. If your phone has not buzzed in a fortnight, your urgency rules are probably too tight — and if it buzzes constantly, they are too loose. Both are worth checking after the first month.
One destination is a single point of failure
If every alert goes to one person’s phone, that person’s holiday is a gap in your cover. Where more than one of you could act on a call, send summaries somewhere shared — a team inbox or a channel — so a call is not waiting on one individual noticing it.
Frequently asked
You can, and most people who do switch it off within a fortnight. Email for everything and text for the urgent ones tends to survive.
Email for the record, text for interruption, WhatsApp if your team already works there. The right answer is usually more than one channel doing different jobs.
That is the setup worth aiming for — everything by email, only what is urgent by text, so interruption still means something.
Sending summaries somewhere shared is worth doing if more than one of you could act on a call. One person’s phone is one person’s holiday away from a gap.
Yes — a confirmation of what was booked, separately from the summary that comes to you.