Which phone system should a pest control office use? (And which ones can't be scored)

About a third of the demos we run stall on the same question, and it has nothing to do with our product. Somebody on the call says "we use Google Voice" or "the office line forwards to my cell," and the meeting is over, whether or not anyone admits it yet. You cannot score calls that were never recorded. You cannot pull recordings out of a system that has no door to pull them through. I am the one who builds the integrations, so I am the one who has to say that out loud on the call.

This post is the recommendation we give verbally, written down so you can read it before you buy a phone system instead of after. It is opinionated. It is also honest about what we can and cannot connect to today, because the phone system is the single biggest reason a pest control company that wants call grading cannot have it.

What a phone system needs before anyone can score your calls

Forget the feature grid on the vendor's pricing page for a minute. There are five things that matter for an office that wants to know what is happening on the phones, and most of them are not the things the salesperson will lead with.

• Call recording that is on by default, for every user, inbound and outbound. Not a button the rep presses mid-call. A rep who has to remember to record will forget on the exact calls you wanted to hear.
• An API or webhook that hands the recording to another system when the call ends. This is the part that separates a phone system you can build on from one you cannot. Recording that lives only inside the vendor's app is a dead end.
• Per-user extensions or numbers, so every call maps to a specific person. If four CSRs share one login, you get a company-wide score and no way to coach anyone.
• SMS on the same number the customer called. Follow-up over text only works if the text comes from a number the customer recognizes.
• A mobile app that behaves like the desktop app. In a lot of pest control offices the "office manager" takes half the calls from a truck. If those calls bypass the system, they bypass the recording too.

Notice that price is not on the list. It matters, but it is the wrong first filter. A cheap system that cannot export recordings costs you every insight you were hoping to get from it.

The recommendation, by team size

Under five people on the phones: Quo

Quo is the company formerly called OpenPhone, and it is what we tell small offices to buy. It records calls, it has a public REST API with webhooks, every user gets their own number or extension, texting is on the same number, and the mobile app is good enough that owners actually use it. It is also, from where I sit, one of the best-behaved systems we connect to. When we ask it for a recording, it gives us the recording. That sounds like a low bar. It is not.

The trade-off is that Quo is built for small teams. There is no real queue management, no skills-based routing, no supervisor barge. If you have two or three people answering and one owner who wants to know what they said, none of that matters. If you have twelve reps and a hold queue, you will outgrow it.

Five to fifteen: Dialpad

Dialpad is the middle of the market done well. Recording can be set to automatic by an admin, the API exposes recording URLs directly on the call record, users have their own extensions, and it handles call queues and ring groups without turning into a contact-center project. It is the system we recommend most often to companies with a real inside-sales desk that is not yet a call center.

One caution: Dialpad has its own built-in transcription and AI summary features, and the sales rep will show them to you. They are fine as a general business tool. They do not know what a first close is, what your guarantee is called, or whether the rep quoted the quarterly plan. General-purpose call summaries and script-level call scoring are different products, and you should not pay for the first one thinking you got the second.

Fifteen and up: the contact-center platforms

Five9, Genesys Cloud, NICE CXone, Zoom Contact Center and the upper tiers of RingCentral are built for a different job. They exist for companies with queues, IVR trees, workforce scheduling, supervisors who need to listen live, and enough volume that a two percent change in answer rate is somebody's quarterly goal. Multi-location companies that centralize their inside sales end up here, and that is the right call for them.

The cost of that power is implementation. These systems are sold and configured by partners, the rollout is measured in weeks, and every one of them will try to sell you their own analytics add-on. All of them record calls and all of them expose recordings through an API, so scoring works fine once you are live. My advice is to not buy one of these because you think you might need it in two years. Buy it when the queue is a problem today.

What to avoid, and why it keeps happening

Three setups account for almost every demo we have had to end early. None of them are bad products. They are just the wrong products for an office that wants to see what is happening on its calls.

Google Voice is the most common. It is free or nearly free, it works on a phone, and a lot of one-truck companies started on it and never left. Recording on Google Voice is limited and, depending on the account type, manual, and we have not found any supported way to pull recordings out programmatically. If your team is on Google Voice, no call-scoring product can help you until you move. I say that about ours too.

Grasshopper is the second. It sells itself as a virtual phone number for small businesses, and for that it is fine. It does advertise call recording, but we have not found a public API for getting those recordings out, and without that door there is nothing to integrate. We have had a full meeting with a company that had just bought Grasshopper. It was a good meeting. It went nowhere.

The third is the one that surprises people: a business number that simply forwards to a cell phone. A lot of these are sold by small telecom resellers, and the pitch is that you keep your existing cell and never miss a call. That is true. It also means the call is happening on your carrier's network, not in any system, and there is no recording anywhere. If the owner takes every sales call on a forwarded cell, the company's entire sales process lives in one person's memory.

The pattern behind all three is the same. The company picked a phone system when it was one or two people, the system was chosen for cost and convenience, and nobody revisited the decision when a third or fourth person started answering. That is normal. It is also the moment to switch, because moving three people is a weekend and moving ten is a project.

A note on Voice for Pest

Voice for Pest deserves its own paragraph because it is the one pest-specific option and a lot of companies we talk to already have it. It is a bundle: a phone system, a FieldRoutes screen-pop that brings up the account when a customer calls, and an optional call-analysis add-on called X-Ray. Companies that have it tend to keep it, mostly for the screen-pop, and we are not going to tell you to rip it out.

Plaibook runs alongside Voice for Pest rather than replacing it. We pull the recordings and score them; the phone system keeps doing what it does. If you are on it, ask us about your specific setup before assuming anything, because the recording access has depended on the account in the past. If you are not on it and you are deciding between it and one of the systems above, the honest summary is that the bundle is convenient and the implementation timeline is the thing to ask hard questions about.

The table

Here is the same information in one place. "Plaibook status" is what is true today, not what is on a roadmap. We build phone integrations for free, and one with a proper API usually takes us about a day, so "not built yet" is a scheduling problem rather than a wall. "Cannot integrate" is a wall.

The full current list, including field service systems, is on our integrations page. If yours is not on it, that page also says how long a new one takes.

Questions to ask the phone vendor before you sign

If you are evaluating something not in the table, these five questions will tell you in ten minutes whether it can be scored. Ask them of the salesperson, and if the salesperson does not know, ask for someone who does. Vague answers are answers.

• Can an admin turn on recording for every user, so no rep has to press anything?
• Do you have a public API, and does it return a recording URL for a completed call? Ask for the documentation link, not a yes.
• Is there a webhook that fires when a call ends? Polling works, but a webhook means the recording shows up in minutes rather than hours.
• Does each user get an extension or a number, and does the API tell me which user handled a call?
• Is recording included in the plan I am buying, or is it an add-on? Several systems put it behind a tier upgrade.

A phone system that passes all five will work with any scoring product, ours included. One that fails the second question will not work with any of them, no matter what the analytics add-on is called.

If you are switching

Port your existing number rather than getting a new one. Every system in the table supports number porting, it usually takes a week or two, and it is the difference between customers still reaching you and customers calling a dead line from a five-year-old truck wrap. Set up recording on day one, before anyone takes a call, and check it on day two by pulling a recording yourself. Give each person their own login, even the owner who swears they only answer "sometimes."

Then, before you start grading, decide what a good call looks like at your company. That is a scorecard question and not a phone question, but I mention it because the companies that get the most out of a new phone system are the ones that already know what they want to hear on it. There is a bit more on how the scoring side works in our FAQ, including which systems we connect to and how long a new integration takes.

The short version of all of this: buy Quo if you are small, buy Dialpad if you are growing, buy a contact-center platform when the queue hurts, and do not buy anything that cannot hand your recordings to another system. The phone system is the foundation for everything you might later want to know about your sales calls. Pick one that was built to be built on.