A church office is usually one part time administrator and a lot of goodwill. Meanwhile the community rings about weddings, funerals, service times, hall bookings and, sometimes, because they have nobody else to ring.
A church phone carries two completely different kinds of call, and the pastoral ones are the reason the organisation exists. Neither should reach a machine.
These are not phone problems. They are the gap between a part time office and a community that does not keep office hours.
Nine or twelve hours of paid administration against a community that rings seven days.
Somebody in genuine distress needs a human voice, quickly, not a message left on a machine.
Which is unreliable, inconsistent and unfair to people giving their time.
Weddings, funerals and hall hire all need dates, capacities, fees and availability.
What time, is there parking, is there a creche, when is the Christmas service.
Requests and promises live in whoever answered the phone that day.
This is the call that used to ring out. Here it is being answered by a Uniden Voice AI phone agent, in an Australian accent, from what you told it about your parish.
Publish one number. Behind it, pastoral calls reach clergy immediately, bookings are handled properly, and general enquiries never need a volunteer.
Parish call volume spikes around Christmas and Easter, and around every wedding and funeral season in between. The office does not grow to meet it.
An AI agent covers every hour at those peaks, handles the routine enquiries, and makes sure the pastoral calls reach a person rather than a machine.
Uniden Voice connects to more than a thousand apps and offers open APIs, so a call can arrive with the family and their history with your parish attached rather than just a number.
The caller's name, their history and their open booking appear on the handset or in the app as it rings, so the first thing out of your mouth is their name and not "who am I speaking with".
Ring a parishioner straight from the record in your church management system, without ever typing a number. Fewer wrong numbers, and every call logged against the right file automatically.
Recording, transcript, AI summary and the next action land in your CRM or your shared drive. Nobody has to remember what was promised on a Friday afternoon.
Plenty of platforms will sell you AI at enterprise prices. Very few start at a single user, keep everything onshore, and come from a brand Australians have known since 1966.
Designed and built in Australia, hosted in Australian datacentres, and supported by Australians you can actually get on the phone. Your customer conversations do not leave the country.
The AI answers in a genuine Australian voice. It matters, because a caller who thinks they have reached an offshore call centre hangs up before you get the chance to help them.
The EVOC2 desk handset where you want something solid to grab, plus real Uniden apps for Windows, Mac, Linux, iOS and Android. Same number, whether you are at a desk or away from the office.
Keep your numbers including 1300 and 1800, and take the NBN connection from us too. Fewer vendors to chase when something goes wrong at the worst possible moment.
The agent does not attempt pastoral care, and we configure it explicitly not to. What it does is recognise that a call is pastoral within a sentence or two and get a human on the phone quickly, which is precisely what a machine cannot do today.
The comparison is not the agent versus your minister. It is the agent versus an answering machine at 9:30 at night, which is what someone in distress currently reaches.
Plans start at a single user, so it is priced for a small organisation rather than an enterprise. For most parishes the cost is comparable to a very small number of additional administration hours.
The difference is that it covers all one hundred and sixty eight hours of the week rather than nine.
Yes, from the information you give it. Availability, capacities, fees, what is included and what your process requires. It can provisionally hold a date and flag it for the office to confirm.
That means an enquiry on a Sunday evening is captured properly rather than lost by Monday.
It hands over, and you decide where. Any pastoral matter, any safeguarding concern and any complaint can go straight through to a person, to a specific queue, or to a manager's mobile.
The caller is not asked to repeat themselves either. Whoever picks up gets the context the agent already gathered. Outside hours the agent takes the details, sends an SMS confirmation and queues the callback.
That is where it earns its keep. You advertise one number and we route behind it: by parish, by time of day, by queue, with overflow so a call at a flat out parish rings somewhere quieter instead of ringing out.
Each parish can keep its own greeting and its own direct number as well. Reporting rolls up across all of them, so you can finally compare how each one handles its phone.
No. Number portability is standard, including 1300 and 1800 numbers, so the number on your published parish number and noticeboard listings and on years of Google results stays exactly as it is.
We port it across and plan the cutover around your hours, not ours.
Calls keep flowing. The mobile app keeps working over 4G and 5G, so your people can answer on their handsets while a site connection is down, and call flows can be set to divert to mobiles automatically.
You can also take your NBN service from Uniden Voice, so the connection and the phone system are one provider with one support number, instead of two companies each suggesting the problem belongs to the other.
A single site can be live quickly, because the apps need no hardware and the handsets arrive ready to plug in. The part worth doing properly is the call flow and the AI agent's knowledge of your business, and we build that with you rather than handing you a manual.
Number porting is the one step with an external timeline, so we usually run your new setup alongside the old line until the port completes. You never trade a day without a phone.
Book fifteen minutes. Tell us how calls reach your office today, and we will show you the version that answers seven days a week.