When callers say they can't get through, your reports show which team is missing calls, who those calls rang, and when they happen. Most missed calls come down to how a group rings, and a few small changes to the group usually fix it.

Start with the Overview report, filtered by team

Sign in to the admin portal.
In the left-hand sidebar, click Reporting. Overview opens.
In the Group filter at the top of the page, pick the team you want to look at, for example one office.
Set the date range to Past 7 days or Last week.

Use the reports for this, not the Call log. The Call log shows one call at a time, which helps once you know what you're looking for, but a single call rarely explains a pattern.

Read the Calls per person chart

Calls per person shows each person's calls in the period, split into:

Answered (green): calls they picked up.
Missed (no one answered) (red): calls that rang them and nobody answered. These are the callers your team lost.
Rang, team answered (light green): calls that rang them but a colleague answered. This is normal when a group rings several people.
Made (blue): calls they made.

Look for people with a lot of red and few answered calls. They're the first people to talk to.

Cradle only rings group members who are free. People who are on a call, busy or offline aren't rung, and people who are away or idle are moved down a box. So a big Call first box usually rings far fewer people than it lists, and fewer still straight away. Before adding more people to a group, check who its calls actually rang (admins in the Cradle Calls CLI private beta can see this for each team; see Using an AI assistant below). When a team misses a call, it rang the people who were free and none of them answered.

The Missed Calls table further down has an Unreturned tab: the callers nobody has rung back yet.

What's a good answer rate?

Your answer rate is the share of incoming calls that someone answered. As a best-practice guide, aim for:

Kind of team	Aim for
Accounting and professional services	90%
Sales-led or customer support teams	97 to 98%

A small team with only a few calls a week sees its answer rate jump around from week to week. Look over a month to see the real picture.

Change how the group rings

Make these changes in the admin portal under Groups, then the group. For what each setting does, see Advanced Group settings.

Make sure someone free rings straight away. A first attempt that rings nobody is almost never answered. Put people in Call first who are usually available when calls come in, not people who are often out, in meetings or on other calls. Someone who is often away or idle effectively starts in Call second.

Ring the box together. Set Call distribution mode to Simultaneous, so everyone free in a box rings at the same time, rather than Balanced, which rings one person at a time.

Ring the right number of people. Ringing more people can help, but everyone a call rings is interrupted by it, every time. Don't add the whole team by default. As a starting point, we suggest:

one or two people whose job is to answer calls, and pass them on, in Call first;
the next three or four people most likely to answer in Call second;
no more than 10 people in any box.

Try a shorter ring time. Many callers hang up within 15 to 25 seconds of ringing. We suggest setting Ring time per person to 12 seconds (four rings) for a team that answers quickly, or 15 seconds (five rings) otherwise, so Call second starts ringing before most callers give up. Ring times go up in steps of 3 seconds.

Check who's in the group. People who aren't customer-facing, or don't see answering the phone as part of their job, tend to miss most of the calls that ring them. Have a conversation with them, or move them out of Call first.

One person misses almost everything. If someone misses nearly every call while they're available, it may be their setup: no headset plugged in, the Cradle desktop app closed, or the wrong microphone or speaker selected. Check with them before assuming anything else.

Connect regular callers to the right person

Think before adding a voice menu. Before adding a voice menu, ask whether callers really need to choose. A voice menu adds a step for every caller, and they often hang up before reaching anyone. Ringing the right group straight away usually serves them better. This applies to a Dynamic Voice Menu too.

If many of your calls come from clients who deal with one person, they can reach that person directly instead of ringing the whole team. Turn these on in Rules, on the rule for the number they call:

Smart Connect connects callers to the person they have an established relationship with. See Smart Connect.
Contact owner routing (when a CRM that supports it is connected) rings the caller's contact owner in your CRM first.
A Dynamic Voice Menu offers each caller the person they most likely want, such as their contact owner or the last person they spoke to, with a fallback you choose.

See How do I route calls? for setting up rules.

Try a change for a week, then compare

Change one thing at a time and leave it for a week. Then open the Overview report for the same group and compare the week before the change with the week after. Use whole weeks, so both include a Monday and a Friday.

If one week had far more or far fewer calls, or a public holiday, the answer rate may have moved for that reason alone.

Using an AI assistant

If your organisation is in the Cradle Calls CLI private beta, admins can ask their AI assistant questions like "Which office is missing the most calls?", "Why is the Sales team missing calls?" or "Did last week's routing change help?". Its diagnose report shows how much of each team actually rang: the share of the team, and of its first step, that a call rang on average. Close to 100% on nearly every call means everyone is interrupted by every call, so the group may be bigger than it needs to be; a low figure means people were busy, away or not signed in. The CLI can also save these reports as charts. The chart files hold your call data, so keep them on your own computer and don't upload them to chart or hosting services. See Connecting your AI assistant with the Cradle Calls CLI.

Finding out why calls are missed