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Choosing who your assistant replies to

By default your assistant replies to everyone who messages your number. For most businesses that is exactly right — every message is a potential customer.

Some businesses need the opposite. If your number exists to serve a known set of people — account customers, duty staff at sites you serve, dispatch contacts at partner companies — then you want your assistant answering those people and nobody else. That is what Authorised Contacts is for.

What changes when you turn it on

Your assistant replies only to contacts on your list.

Anyone else gets a single, polite message telling them they are not on it, and nothing further — no conversation, and no repeat of that message if they keep writing. Missed calls from numbers that are not on your list stay silent.

Everyone on your list carries on exactly as before.

Adding someone: verify, don't just type

Adding a contact is a short verification, not a form field. It takes about a minute and you do it with the person on the phone or standing next to you.

1. In Settings → Authorised Contacts, open a listening window. It stays open for three minutes.
2. Ask them to send any message to your number.
3. They appear as pending, and your assistant sends three random words to them.
4. Ask them to read the three words back to you.
5. If they match, confirm — and they are authorised. Give them a name while you are there.

Why the three words. A number typed into a box proves nothing about who is holding the phone. Hearing the words back from the person you intended confirms you have authorised the right contact — not a mistyped digit, not an old number that has since changed hands, not a colleague's second phone. It is the same principle as reading a code back over the phone before granting access to anything else, and it takes about as long.

The window and the pending list are deliberately short-lived. If you get interrupted, just open the window again.

Names are what your assistant calls them

The name you give a contact is not just for your own reference. It is what your assistant knows them as in conversation, and it is what appears when something gets escalated to you — so "Northside depot" is worth typing over "Northside."

It stays off until you turn it on

Authorised Contacts is off on every new account, so nothing blocks you while you are setting up. Turn it on when your list is complete — not before, or you will be answering your own test messages with a rejection.

One thing worth being clear about: this decides who your assistant talks to. It is not a replacement for the access controls on your own systems.

If you also use AllCall

AllCall has the same feature for phone calls, and it works differently — a call and a message tell us different things about who is on the other end. If you run both, read Choosing who your assistant takes orders from rather than assuming this article covers it.