Never miss a call with the top franchise answering service
Capture new leads and answer common questions from your callers 24/7 with Sona, OpenPhone’s AI agent. Eliminate missed calls and deliver a better customer experience using the best phone system for growing businesses.
Trusted by over 60,000 businesses
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Smarter than voicemail, more effective than live answering services
Sona greets callers, answers questions, and captures messages all within the same system you can use to call and text with existing and prospective customers.
Why Sona is a better virtual receptionist for your franchise business
Here are four ways Sona outperforms traditional call answering services:
1. Integrates directly in your business phone
OpenPhone is a collaborative business phone designed to help small and growing businesses scale their customer interactions. You can make calls, send texts, and build stronger customer relationships as a team using OpenPhone’s platform.
Sona is integrated directly in OpenPhone. Sona’s call recordings, summaries, and transcripts appear in your OpenPhone workspace minutes after a call ends. You can see calls Sona handled within your existing conversation history so you can easily get up to speed in context with all other calls and messages with a contact.
Traditional call answering services force you to track their progress in a custom app. You’ll have to match answering service calls with your CRM and address book because their conversations happen outside your business phone. It’s a fragmented experience that adds more work for your team.
2. More cost-effective
Save thousands of dollars a month with Sona. Many franchise answering services charge 4x-7x the cost of Sona. They have expensive plans based on a limited number of call minutes. And on top of that, additional per-minute charges apply if you exceed that limit.
Sona charges a flat fee for the first 50 calls it handles on behalf of your business. After that, it charges a fixed fee for every call, not for every minute. It’s designed to give you the most value from your answering service.
3. Consistent service
Offer a consistent customer experience with Sona. Train Sona on your company’s documents in seconds. Test it before it handles calls for you and make edits based on its ongoing performance.
With live answering services, on the other hand, you never have full control over how their teams represent your business. Even after weeks of onboarding and training, there is always room for error. Your call quality might also be affected by staff turnover; an AI answering service always shows up for work and delivers the same level of service.
4. Works for individual locations and multi-location franchises
Sona is a flexible franchise answering service, whether you manage an individual location or a franchise network. If you manage multiple locations, you can add Sona to each location’s phone number and customize its settings.
Different franchises may have different pricing and operating hours, and Sona can accommodate all those details. Modify Sona’s greeting based on each franchise’s name so that you can offer a truly personalized experience to callers.
Handle franchise operations smoothly
Train Sona in seconds. Assign Sona to your calls in minutes.
Add Sona to after-hours call flows
Don't lose out on potential new customers. Simply drag and drop Sona into your existing call flows, during and after business hours. Sona works alongside OpenPhone’s call routing features like ring order, phone menus, and call forwarding.
Train Sona to handle common questions
Save time for your team and let Sona answer your most common questions. Add your key policies and answers to FAQs so Sona can give the right information to your customers.
Capture every detail in your messages
Take detailed messages with Sona. It can ask follow-up questions based on specific keywords in a conversation. For example, if a potential customer asks about your plans and pricing, Sona can ask them what products and services they’re interested in and pass that along to your team so you can follow up faster.
Review Sona’s calls instantly
See Sona’s call summaries, transcripts, and messages in your OpenPhone inbox right after its AI phone calls end. Automatically sync Sona’s call logs with your CRM — use our integrations with HubSpot, Jobber, and Salesforce, or build your own workflow using Zapier, Make, or the OpenPhone API.
Feature comparison
See how Sona compares to traditional call answering services.
Features
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Sona
Traditional answering services
Starting price per month
$49 for 50 calls, $0.99 per call for additional calls
~5x-7x the cost of Sona
Setup time
Instant
2-4 weeks
Brand voice and tone
Consistent
Highly variable
Monitoring
100% in OpenPhone
Custom solution or daily email summary
Integrations
HubSpot, Salesforce, Zapier, Make, Jobber, and more
Limited integration options
How to set up Sona in four steps
It only takes four steps to get started with Sona:
- Start with a free trial.
- Try our free trial features, including calls and recordings.
- Configure your Sona settings and test Sona in OpenPhone’s call flow builder.
- Once you’ve confirmed it’s a good fit, activate your OpenPhone account and get the Sona add-on.
“With Sona, I never worry about missing a call again. It’s like having a smart, reliable assistant who always picks up. It’s professional, friendly, and on it 24/7.”
Why thousands of franchise owners choose OpenPhone
See why franchise businesses like Pink’s Windows, Smash My Trash, and F45 Training choose OpenPhone.
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Get multiple local and toll-free numbers
Add as many numbers as you need with OpenPhone. Choose between local US or Canadian phone numbers and North American toll-free numbers. If you manage multiple franchise locations, you can select local numbers with specific area codes for each location. And with a dedicated toll-free number, you can offer nationwide customer support across all your locations.
All OpenPhone plans include a phone number for every user who joins your workspace. Your team members can have individual numbers, or you can share numbers for specific departments. Additional numbers cost just $5 per number per month.
Call handling made easy
Manage your incoming customer calls smoothly with OpenPhone. Set up custom call routing in seconds with our call flow builder. Map out how calls are routed during and after business hours and make adjustments in our drag-and-drop visual canvas.
Give your team the essential business phone features to handle any call volume. Choose how your team receives phone calls, simultaneously or in custom batches, with ring groups. Give your callers a self-serve navigation option with phone menus. Direct emergency phone calls to a secondary number with our call forwarding options.
Need to transfer customer calls to a colleague? Warm call transfers help you share the right amount of context with your team when you transfer live calls.
Stronger team collaboration
Collaborate with team members more efficiently with OpenPhone. Split responsibility for inbound calls and texts with shared numbers. View all your customer interactions in one place — calls, texts, voicemails, call recordings, and more — with shared inboxes.
Troubleshoot customer issues in real time and assign follow-up tasks with internal threads. Check whether a teammate is caught up on a particular interaction with inbox viewers.
Send the right text at the right time
Text smarter with OpenPhone’s advanced texting features.
Send SMS and MMS messages to customers, including photos, videos, and GIFs. Automatically reply to customers when your team is busy or unavailable with SMS auto-replies. Schedule texts for customers in advance with scheduled messages. Reply faster and answer common questions during business hours with pre-written text templates, also known as snippets.
Set up automated text message workflows to deliver timely messages like appointment confirmations or reminders using our Zapier and Make integrations.
Get repetitive admin tasks done faster
Help your team focus better on your customers by automating admin work for them.
Automatically record your calls and generate AI-powered call summaries and transcripts so your team doesn’t have to spend time taking notes on their calls. Use AI to analyze phone calls and gain business insights with AI call tags.
Sync call and text data with your tools automatically using our third-party integrations. Choose from CRM integrations with HubSpot and Salesforce, or build your own integration with the OpenPhone API.
Better oversight for managers
Business owners and managers can manage their teams better with OpenPhone.
Track your team’s real-time performance with call views. View their historical performance on a monthly and quarterly basis with call analytics. You can also see which times of the week are busiest for your team with heatmaps and allocate resources to meet your business needs.
Call and text from anywhere
Whether you’re in the office or on the go, OpenPhone travels with you. Download our desktop and mobile apps for your device and start making calls — all you need is an internet connection. OpenPhone is available for Mac, Windows, iOS, Android, and on the web, so your team can use their preferred devices to access our platform.
Find out how much you’re investing in your business phone solution upfront on our pricing page.
Frequently asked questions
Can’t find the answer here? Check out our Resource Center.
An answering service handles incoming calls on behalf of an individual or a business. It can function in-house for companies, like an AI receptionist, or it can be outsourced to a third-party provider, like a virtual assistant. Typically, answering services answer common questions from callers or take down messages they pass along to the rest of the team.
Franchise answering service costs are variable because they charge fixed plan and per-minute fees based on your call usage. Most services range from $180-$350 per month for a fixed number of minutes, after which calls are charged by the minute.
Sona costs $49 per month for 50 calls; additional calls are $0.99 each. It’s a more cost-effective option because we bill you based on your calls instead of by the minute. We also don’t bill you for calls that last less than 15 seconds, which means your spam calls or wrong numbers won’t be added to your Sona bill or go toward the monthly allotment of 50 calls.
A call center is a full-time customer service department that attends to customer requests over the phone. It’s intended for large call volumes common with enterprise companies. Call center call quality is extremely variable; US-based teams tend to be more expensive, so call center services are often outsourced outside the US to reduce costs. Call centers also require a lot of effort to set up because reps have to be trained and evaluated on the company’s documentation.
Phone answering services are a more user-friendly and lower-lift customer support option.They can answer basic customer questions, take messages and pass them along to teams. They’re intended for businesses that have lower call volumes or that want to manage spikes in call volumes.
We’re biased, but in our opinion, Sona is the best answering service for small and growing businesses. It can handle calls 24/7 and answer questions accurately based on your company’s information. It can take detailed messages and capture leads in a way similar to dedicated sales AI tools. It’s easy to set up and customize, and it’s 100% integrated in your business phone.
With all these features, franchise businesses can use Sona as an AI voice agent to improve customer satisfaction over the phone. Callers get a better experience compared to leaving a voicemail, and teams have more context before they call back.
Sona works for individual franchise locations and multi-location franchises. You can allocate phone numbers to different locations and limit access to relevant team members. With multiple locations communicating in one platform, you can get visibility into each team’s performance and share best practices with each team.
Contact our Sales team! We can set you up with a dedicated customer success manager who can help you onboard multiple franchises to OpenPhone.
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