About
We think the phone still matters
Most software sold to small businesses tries to move customers off the phone. We went the other way. For an enormous number of trades and practices, the phone is still where the work comes from — and it's still the thing nobody has time to answer.
Butler Line started from a simple observation: the businesses losing the most money to missed calls are exactly the ones least able to hire someone to answer them. A two-truck plumbing outfit cannot justify a full-time receptionist, so the phone rings out, and the work goes to whoever picked up.
An answering service should sound like your business, know your prices, and put the appointment on your calendar — not read from a card and promise a callback. That's the whole product.
How we operate
- We tell callers what they're talking to
- Every call opens with Butler Line identifying itself as an automated receptionist. We won't build a product that depends on a caller not noticing.
- We don't detail our stack publicly
- Butler Line runs on voice infrastructure we don't describe on a marketing site, which is ordinary for software companies. Customers under agreement can request our subprocessor list, and we answer security questionnaires properly rather than deflecting.
- We say no to outbound
- We get asked regularly to turn this into a cold-calling dialer. We decline. Butler Line answers phones; it doesn't interrupt people at dinner.