Natterbox wants your phone calls to do their own paperwork

A missed call is a peculiar business expense: you can pay for the advertising that prompted it, pay someone else to answer it, and still end up without a useful customer record. At UK property buyer We Buy Any Home and its associated estate agency Sold.co.uk, the overflow problem had acquired a monthly price tag of £4,000 for an outside answering service. Natterbox’s customer account says AI now triages roughly 1,000 calls a month that previously went unanswered by the team. The answering-service expense has gone.

That is a more revealing introduction to Natterbox than a talking avatar. The London company sells the machinery behind business conversations: phone service, routing, recordings, messaging and the notes that make the next call less awkward. Its defining bet is that these things belong inside Salesforce, where many businesses already keep their customer relationships. AI gives the machinery more work to do.

The promise is attractive precisely because it is unromantic. A caller wants a price, an appointment or the right person. An employee wants to stop copying details between windows. A manager wants to know what happened. Natterbox is trying to make one conversation satisfy all three.

The phone moves into the customer record

Natterbox was incorporated in 2009 and launched services in 2010. Its founders, Neil Hammerton, Neil Burgess and Jim Page, came with experience in cloud services and communications. Hammerton and Burgess remain listed as chief executive and chief technology officer. Their earlier work together included Email Systems, a security and compliance business. They arrived at voice with experience of selling infrastructure that customers consumed as a service.

The early proposition was a cloud business phone system connected to customer processes. By the time Natterbox announced its 2018 Series A with Octopus Investments, it was pitching a system managed entirely within Salesforce. Funding was earmarked for sales, marketing and geographic expansion, including North America and the Nordics. This was enterprise software with a telephone attached, aimed at a buyer who already cared about CRM.

Octopus committed a further £7.5 million in April 2020. The investment announcement described more than 500 business customers, including Groupon, Legal & General and NatWest. It also pointed to Freedom, an interface for working across devices, as companies moved staff out of offices. Phone service had to follow the employee without losing the customer history.

Today, the product sits across cloud telephony and contact center software, with AI added to both employee and customer workflows. Its practical expertise is in joining up calls, queues and business rules. A well-spoken automated answer is useful; getting the caller to the correct destination, with the correct record, is what makes it operational.

Three jobs for the new voice in the office

Natterbox separates its AI offering into jobs that buyers can recognize. AI Advisor works on employee performance and administration: transcribing calls, producing summaries, suggesting next steps and updating Salesforce fields. Its coaching features evaluate conversations against criteria chosen by the business. Prompt Studio lets teams customize the instructions behind the analysis.

That gives a supervisor a different starting point from listening to a small sample of recordings. It also introduces a management responsibility: deciding what a good conversation looks like. A scorecard built around speed can reward a quick exit. One built around accurate resolution asks a more useful question. The software supplies the assessment mechanism; the business still chooses the standard.

AI Assistants face callers, answering common questions and steering them to the appropriate resource. AI Agents take the next step, completing configured tasks and routine enquiries. Natterbox launched the two in July 2025, following AI Call Coaching in September 2024 and AI Assist for post-call work that November. The sequence matters: the product moved from helping staff review conversations to handling some conversations itself.

There is also a less theatrical expansion beyond voice. Natterbox Digital, announced in February 2025, brought voice, SMS and WhatsApp together in Salesforce. Its current offering includes chat and a shared inbox. Teams can collaborate on messages and automate reminders or updates. The customer who texts after calling should not have to become a brand-new mystery.

Partners fill out specific tasks. ScreenMeet supplies the visual-support technology behind Remote Assist, so an agent can use screen or mobile-camera sharing to understand a problem. PCI Pal powers an integrated telephone payment option. These are useful reminders that a contact center has to do more than converse. Sometimes it has to see the faulty item or help complete a purchase.

A tool catalogue is a demanding conversation partner

Sutton Tools offers a particularly concrete test. In Natterbox’s case study, about 60% of incoming support calls concerned repeat requests such as prices and stock availability. Its catalogue contained more than 500,000 items, with inconsistent product codes that complicated recognition. Before anyone could automate the answer, the system had to identify what the caller meant.

The manufacturer deployed an AI Agent for those routine enquiries, connected to its existing Salesforce setup, with call outcomes and transcripts logged there. Natterbox reports that 77% of calls were handled end-to-end by AI. The customer also described little resistance from callers and an initially hesitant team becoming persuaded by the results.

“The results were way beyond my expectations.”

Robert Sutton · Commercial Director, Sutton Tools

The two percentages describe different measures, rather than a before-and-after improvement. Nor does one manufacturer’s experience predict another company’s result. The useful lesson is narrower: choose a frequent question with a checkable answer, connect it to the relevant information and watch whether people actually accept the service.

Travel business Secret Escapes provides a different scale of result. Natterbox’s customer marketing reports 30% of calls handled by AI, a six-week journey from contract to launch and customer satisfaction holding steady. That last measure deserves attention. Removing calls from a queue only helps if customers still get what they came for.

At We Buy Any Home, the initial AI deployment focused on buyer enquiries, a comparatively low-risk area. It qualified callers, captured details and handled overflow. The reported £48,000 annual reduction in answering-service expense is a clear avoided cost. It should not be mistaken for net profit from AI: net savings require subtracting the replacement service and operating costs.

The seat price is the beginning of the bill

Natterbox sells subscriptions, with optional features and custom enterprise packages. Its public pricing starts at £62 or US$82 per user per month for Pro, which includes core voice, recording, routing features, Salesforce integration and support. Premium starts at £111 or US$146 and adds digital channels, a shared inbox and more advanced routing. Enterprise is quoted individually and includes the AI suite.

For an illustrative 20-user team, the published UK starting rates multiply to £1,240 a month for Pro or £2,220 for Premium. Those are seat-price calculations, not complete deployment budgets. A buyer should get the required AI, telephony usage, onboarding and Salesforce arrangements specified in the quote before comparing the result with an existing bill.

The sensible purchasing exercise begins with the work. Count repeat enquiries, missed calls and minutes spent finishing records. Then test whether the proposed automation removes that work or merely moves it to a supervisor who must correct the output. Ask to see the finished Salesforce record as well as the conversation. A charming demo is an incomplete acceptance test.

Salesforce is the advantage - and the filter

Natterbox competes with business calling and contact center vendors including Aircall, Talkdesk and Five9. Salesforce integration is not exclusive to Natterbox: the AppExchange lists other providers, including Talkdesk and Five9. The distinction is the weight Natterbox places on running communications within that environment. For an organization committed to Salesforce, the concentration can reduce the distance between a conversation and an action.

For a business spread across several CRMs, that same concentration may be less attractive. Aircall, for example, makes breadth of integrations a point of comparison. The choice is partly architectural: buy deeply into the system that already organizes customer work, or prioritize connections across a wider collection of applications.

Data quality and process ownership also set limits. A price enquiry is only as useful as the price it retrieves. Unclear escalation rules can strand a caller even when the speech sounds natural. A practical pilot therefore needs people who own the records, people who answer the calls and someone authorized to decide when automation should stop. Starting small makes those decisions easier to inspect.

Even the office used to say hello

Natterbox’s former One Croydon offices took the conversation theme literally. Design studio Giant Arc installed a neon greeting for arrivals and a farewell for departures. Staff contributed lines of code to the graphics. Its account of the project describes a workplace designed to speak, from reception to the breakout spaces.

The company’s careers material is more practical: flexible work, a remote-working allowance, development programs, apprenticeships and wellbeing support. These are the employer’s stated practices. They suit a business whose own software promises that work can follow people across locations.

There is a pleasing tension in the name. Brightec, a product design partner, traces it to the natterboxes in Roald Dahl’s The BFG. Yet much of the company’s value depends on eliminating unnecessary talk: repeated explanations, routine questions passed between staff and conversations that end with someone typing everything again.

The most convincing version of Natterbox leaves a smaller pile of unfinished work. The caller gets an answer. The employee gets usable context. The record is ready for whoever picks up next. In a business built around talking, knowing what to do after the conversation may be the part worth paying for.