Calling from inside your CRM

Most CRMs don't make phone calls. They log them. You dial from your cell, hang up, switch to the CRM, find the contact, and type what happened. The CRM is a filing cabinet you visit afterwards.

That gap is where the notes you never wrote down went.

Groundbase has the phone in it. There's a dialer, every call lands in one list attached to the right contact, voicemails come with transcriptions, and you can drop a pre-recorded voicemail instead of saying the same thing for the fortieth time that morning.

One page for every call

Outbound, inbound answered, missed, voicemail — one list, newest first, each row tied to the contact it belongs to.

Filter chips for Missed and Voicemail carry counts, so the question "did I miss anything?" is answered by looking at the page rather than scrolling it.

Click any row and the dialer opens with that number already filled in. Returning a missed call is one click from the thing that told you about it.

The dialer

A keypad, ring-out state, in-call controls, and an overlay when someone's calling you. It runs in the browser, so there's no separate softphone app to install and no desk phone to configure.

You can type a name instead of a number — it searches your contacts — and the recent-calls list sits right underneath, so redialling someone from an hour ago doesn't mean going to find them first.

Voicemail, transcribed

Callers can leave up to two minutes, ending with # or just hanging up. The recording lands against the contact and gets transcribed, so voicemail becomes something you read — skim six of them in the time it takes to listen to two.

Playing one marks it read. Voicemail transcription is on by default.

Recording, and the part nobody likes talking about

Call recording is a toggle in Settings, and it's off by default. Turn it on and every inbound and outbound call records, attaches to the contact, and can be transcribed too — a searchable archive of what was actually said.

Now the uncomfortable bit. When you enable it, Groundbase shows you this:

Recording calls may be subject to consent laws depending on where you and the other party are located. In some jurisdictions you are legally required to inform the other party that the call is being recorded. Groundbase does not play an automatic announcement — you must disclose recording yourself.

That's deliberate, and it's a real limitation rather than a shrug. Plenty of tools bury recording consent in a terms-of-service checkbox and let you assume it's handled. It isn't handled. Two-party consent states — California and Florida among them — and much of Europe require the other person to actually know. Groundbase won't announce it for you, so if you record, say so out loud at the start of the call.

I'd rather the product told you that in the moment you flip the switch than let you find out from a lawyer.

Voicemail drops

The reason this feature exists: if you're calling thirty people, you will leave the same twenty-five-second voicemail thirty times, and by the tenth one you sound like you've given up.

A voicemail drop is a clip you record once — ten to twenty seconds is about right — and play into the machine with one click instead of performing it live. Two ways to make one:

• Record by phone — Groundbase calls your number, you say the thing, press #, done. Nobody's laptop microphone has ever improved a voicemail.
• Upload a file — an .mp3, .m4a or .wav you recorded elsewhere.

Save a few for different situations — a first-touch, a follow-up, a "returning your call" — and pick from the list mid-call.

Here's how it actually goes: you call the contact normally, and a Drop VM button stays visible for the whole call. You hear the greeting, you hear the beep, you click the button and pick a clip. Then you hang up — your end drops off while the audio keeps playing into their voicemail box. About thirty seconds saved per call, which over a list of thirty is the difference between one sitting and two.

The button does not detect the beep for you. You decide when to press it, and if you press it while a live human is on the line, that person hears your recording. Hang up immediately if that happens, because there's no graceful recovery from it.

I'd rather write that down than let you find it out on a call with someone you wanted to impress. Automatic answering-machine detection is a genuinely hard problem — the services that do it well charge per attempt and still get it wrong, and a false positive means talking over a real person for four seconds. Manual timing is worse ergonomics and better outcomes.

What it costs

Nothing extra from me. Calls go through your own Twilio account at Twilio's per-minute rate, paid directly to Twilio. Groundbase doesn't mark up minutes, doesn't sell you calling credits, and doesn't take a cut.

A rough sense of scale: US outbound is a bit over a cent a minute, and a phone number is about a dollar a month. Talk for three hours in a month and you've spent somewhere near two dollars — with your CRM subscription being the $9, not the calling.

Worth being precise about one thing, because these get conflated: calling doesn't need A2P 10DLC registration. That's a texting requirement. A phone number is enough to start making calls.

What it doesn't do

• No power dialer or auto-dialer. You place calls one at a time. Building a compliant auto-dialer is a much bigger piece of work than it looks, and the ones that aren't compliant get people sued.
• No call queues, IVR trees, or transfers between people. It's a phone for one person, not a contact centre.
• No conference calling.
• Recording is opt-in and unannounced — covered above.

If you need a real call centre, you need a real call centre. This is a phone for the person who currently dials from their cell and writes notes later.

Your AI can read the history too

Call records are exposed through the MCP server, so you can ask Claude who called this week and get an answer from your actual data rather than your memory of it.

Try it

Groundbase is $9/month flat with a 14-day trial. The dialer, call history, voicemail transcription and voicemail drops are all included — there's one plan. (Who it's for, and who it isn't.)

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Questions about this one? Email me directly: blog-phone@groundbasecrm.com — I read every one.