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• Richpanel runs your email, chat, and SMS tickets with real AI. Phone is the one channel it doesn't actually answer, it routes calls to humans through Aircall, JustCall, or Dialpad.
• Most businesses answer only about 38% of inbound calls, and 80% of voicemail-routed callers hang up without leaving a message. After your reps log off, that's your phone line.
• Built for founders, COOs, and Heads of CX at $10M-$100M Shopify brands keeping Richpanel plus a visible phone number. You don't have to rip out Richpanel to fix the phone.

If you run support on Richpanel, you already know its AI is good. It reads the email, pulls the order, processes the return, and replies in your brand voice while your team sleeps. The phone is the part nobody on a Richpanel demo walks you through, because the phone is the one channel where the AI doesn't pick up. Voice on Richpanel runs through a third-party phone system and a human rep. So when your last rep clocks out at 6 p.m., the AI keeps clearing tickets, and the phone rolls to voicemail. Businesses answer only about 37.8% of inbound calls; the rest go to voicemail or nothing at all (AmbsCallCenter).

This is written for the founder, COO, or Head of CX at a $10M-$100M Shopify brand running Richpanel with a visible phone number on the site. We've launched AI phone agents for 50+ Shopify brands sitting on exactly that stack, and the fix is almost never "switch helpdesks." It's "keep Richpanel, add something that answers the phone." Book a 30-min call and we'll look at what your line does after-hours, live.

How Richpanel handles phone today

Richpanel is a helpdesk first. The AI agents resolve repetitive tickets end to end across email, chat, social, and SMS, and the Shopify integration is genuinely strong: order lookup, returns, refunds, cancellations, subscription changes, all in one inbox. It earns its 4.8/5 on the Shopify App Store across 127 reviews (Shopify App Store). None of that is the problem.

Phone on Richpanel is not a native feature, it's an integration with a separate phone system. Voice comes in through Aircall, JustCall, or Dialpad. You connect one of those, and now calls show up inside Richpanel as tickets. A human rep picks up, sees the customer's chat and order history, and can edit the order, apply a discount, or push a refund while they're on the line (Richpanel). That's a nice workflow. It's also entirely human-staffed.

So the mental model matters here. There's "phone in the inbox," which Richpanel does well: the call becomes a ticket, gets recorded, sits next to the customer's order. And there's "AI that answers the phone," which Richpanel does not do. Its AI lives on the async channels. The live call is still a person picking up a headset.

To be fair to Richpanel, that's not a flaw in Richpanel, it's a category line. Helpdesks are built to manage conversations across channels, and most of them treat voice the same way: connect a phone provider, route the call to a human, log it. Gorgias does it, Zendesk does it, Reamaze does it. The voice AI that actually carries the conversation is a different kind of product, and it's the piece your helpdesk was never meant to be. That's worth knowing before you go looking for it inside a Richpanel setting that doesn't exist.

You also pay for the phone twice in a sense. Richpanel itself runs roughly $29 to $89 per seat per month depending on plan, plus add-ons for the self-service portal and AI features (Richpanel pricing). Then the phone system, Aircall or JustCall or Dialpad, is its own subscription on top, billed per seat as well. The more reps you put on the phone, the more both bills climb.

The gap: your AI works 24/7, your phone still rings out

Here's where it bites. Your Richpanel AI is a 24/7 employee on email and chat. Your phone is a 9-to-6 team. Those two facts don't line up, and your customers feel the seam.

The phone is the channel your AI never reaches, which means it's the channel your customers reach a voicemail box. I called a handful of Richpanel-style helpdesk lines after 6 p.m. to see what actually happens. Every one rolled to voicemail. That tracks with the data: 80% of voicemail-routed callers hang up without leaving a message (Eden), and 60% of callers hang up within 60 seconds of being put on hold (Brightmetrics). After a missed call, 62% just buy from a competitor (PCN).

For a Shopify brand at $10M-$100M, the after-hours line is mostly the same five questions: where's my order, can I change my address, do you ship to Canada, how do I start a return, is this back in stock. Repeatable stuff. The same questions over and over. Your reps don't need to be there for it, but right now nobody is, so the calls become voicemails you never return and orders that don't happen.

Think about who's actually calling at 8 p.m. It's the customer who didn't want to dig through your help center, or the older buyer who'd rather talk to a person, or the one about to place a $200 order who has one question before they check out. Richpanel's async AI can answer that same question over email at 8 p.m. The problem is the customer picked up the phone instead of typing, and the phone is the channel the AI doesn't work on. So a buyer who was ready turns into a missed call, and a missed call turns into a competitor's order.

This is the exact gap we fill. WashCo, a Shopify brand we launched, recovered $22,664 in its first 7 days once the phone actually answered. Same store, same call volume, the only change was that the line stopped rolling to voicemail.

3 ways to add phone support on Richpanel

You've basically got three routes. Here's the honest version of each.

Route one is what Richpanel sells you toward, and it's fine if your call volume is low and your hours are generous. The trade-off is that it scales with headcount. Every time call volume goes up, you hire another rep, and you pay for another Richpanel seat and another phone seat.

Route two is what most brands actually do without admitting it. The phone "works," but it works as a voicemail box. You're not answering calls, you're collecting them.

Route three is the one nobody puts on the comparison page. An AI phone agent answers the call live, handles the routine stuff, and when a call genuinely needs a person, it escalates cleanly into your Richpanel inbox with the full context attached. You keep Richpanel as the system of record. You just stop staffing the routine call.

The reason route three is worth a serious look isn't just after-hours. It's daytime too. Right now your reps split their attention between the Richpanel queue and the phone, and the phone always wins because a ringing phone feels urgent. So your team gets pulled off the tickets that need real thought to answer "what's your return window" for the hundredth time. Move the routine call to the AI and your reps go back to the queue, where Richpanel's AI hands them only the tickets that genuinely need a human. Both channels get faster.

How an AI phone agent fits alongside Richpanel

Best for: Shopify brands that like Richpanel for tickets but need the phone answered 24/7 without hiring a night shift. Ringly.io is AI phone support for Shopify brands, and it's built to sit in front of a helpdesk like Richpanel, not replace it.

Here's how it works in practice. The AI answers inbound calls 24/7 in 40 languages. It finds orders in your Shopify store, processes returns and exchanges, answers product questions from your knowledge base, and rescues abandoned carts with outbound follow-up. Across 50+ brands, the AI resolves 73% of calls autonomously at roughly $0.42 per resolved call, versus $7 to $16 per call for human BPO. Calls that genuinely need a human escalate cleanly into Richpanel, Gorgias, Reamaze, or whatever helpdesk you already run, with the transcript and order context attached so your rep isn't starting cold.

The phone is the hardest channel to get right, which is exactly why most tools skip it. Latency, interruptions, accents, an angry customer who wants to talk over you. Get that wrong and you're a Twitter screenshot. The single most repeated thing our customers' callers say is "you don't sound like AI," which is the bar that matters.

Pricing

Grow $349/mo (1,000 minutes, ~500 calls), Pro $799/mo (2,500 minutes), Enterprise custom. 14-day free trial on Pro. Live in under an hour. 65% resolution guarantee: if the AI resolves under 65% of your calls in 90 days, we refund the last 3 months.

What works

• Answers the live call, not just logs it. The thing Richpanel's phone integration leaves to a human, the AI actually does, 24/7.
• Escalates into your helpdesk. Hard calls land in Richpanel with full context, so the AI is additive, not a rip-and-replace.
• Flat monthly, not per-rep. Call volume can triple without your phone bill tripling.
• Real Shopify actions. Order status, returns, knowledge-base answers, and smart transfer to a human when needed.

What doesn't

• It's phone, not chat. If you want AI on email and chat, that's what Richpanel already does well. Ringly is the voice layer, not a full helpdesk.
• It won't take a credit card over the phone. For payment-by-phone we send an SMS payment link instead.
• Subscriptions are a custom action. Pause-and-skip works, but full subscription management may need a setup step.

"My customers also feel like it's a normal person. They feel like they can communicate if they have questions."
Claudia Droge, TechCraft Studio

That's the whole pitch. Keep the helpdesk you like, add the channel it can't cover.

What this costs vs what it saves

Take a typical $50M Shopify brand running a 6-rep CS team where the phone is part of the job:

That's roughly 70% of repeatable calls (order status, returns, product questions, the same five things over and over) handled by the AI. The other 30%, the genuinely complex calls, still go to your CS team through Richpanel, who now have time to actually solve them.

On a per-call basis the gap is wider than people expect. An in-house rep call runs about $2.70 loaded; the AI runs roughly $0.42 per resolved call. BioLongevity Labs, a supplement brand on Ringly, hits 79% resolution autonomously, which is the kind of number that turns the phone from a cost center into a recovered-revenue line.

If you want to compare this to your current Richpanel + phone setup with your real numbers, book a 30-min call and we'll do the math on your actual call volume.

How to choose your Richpanel phone setup

• Choose Aircall/JustCall/Dialpad + reps if your call volume is low, your hours cover most of your customers, and you'd rather have a person on every call. Richpanel's phone integration is well-built for this.
• Choose voicemail + callback if the phone is a backup channel and you're honestly fine losing the after-hours caller. Most brands aren't, but some are.
• Choose an AI phone agent in front of Richpanel if your line rings after-hours, your reps are drowning in WISMO calls, and you want 24/7 phone coverage without growing headcount every quarter.

For most $10M-$100M brands on Richpanel, it's route three plus the helpdesk you already have. You're not replacing anything. You're closing the one gap the helpdesk was never designed to cover. More on the full stack in our guide to building a phone support system for Shopify.

Frequently asked questions

Does Richpanel have built-in phone support? Not natively. Richpanel is a helpdesk, and voice comes through a third-party phone system like Aircall, JustCall, or Dialpad. Once connected, calls show up in Richpanel as tickets that a human rep handles.

Can Richpanel's AI answer phone calls? No. Richpanel's AI resolves email, chat, and SMS tickets end to end, but the live phone call is handled by a human rep. The AI doesn't pick up the phone.

Do I need Aircall to do phone on Richpanel? You need some phone system: Aircall, JustCall, or Dialpad. That's a separate subscription on top of your Richpanel seats, billed per rep.

How much does Richpanel phone support cost? Richpanel runs roughly $29 to $89 per seat per month depending on plan, plus add-ons for the portal and AI (Richpanel pricing). The phone integration is an extra per-seat cost from whichever phone provider you connect.

Can I keep Richpanel and add an AI phone agent? Yes, and that's the point. An AI phone agent answers calls live and escalates the hard ones into your Richpanel inbox with full context. Richpanel stays your system of record.

Does an AI phone agent replace my Richpanel helpdesk? No. It's the voice layer Richpanel doesn't cover. Email and chat stay in Richpanel; the phone gets answered 24/7.

What happens to calls after hours? On a human-only setup, they roll to voicemail, and most callers hang up without leaving one. With an AI phone agent, the routine calls get resolved around the clock and only genuine exceptions wait for a human.

Can callers still reach a human if they want one? Yes. The AI handles the routine call and transfers anything that needs a person, with the transcript and order context already attached so your rep picks up where the AI left off. You set the escalation rules, including any topics that should always go straight to your team.

Talk to us

If you run a $10M-$100M Shopify brand on Richpanel and your phone line goes quiet after 6 p.m., a 30-min call is the fastest way to see what those after-hours calls are actually worth. We'll keep your helpdesk exactly where it is.

The 3-layer guarantee.

1. Live in 14 days or it's free until launched.
2. 65% resolution in 90 days or we refund the last 3 months of subscription fees.
3. We keep working free until we hit 65%.

Ruben (Ringly co-founder) takes these calls personally.

Book a 30-min call →