EmpfangoCapture sick calls by phone – without waking the site manager
Staff call in sick at 5:40 am, when the site manager is still asleep or already on site. Empfango takes the sick call, records the key facts without a diagnosis and notifies the right person immediately.
Capturing sick calls by phone means: the employee dials a number, Empfango picks up, asks for name, site, shift and expected duration and turns that into a case. The site manager receives a structured message via WhatsApp, Telegram or email instead of a half-asleep phone call. According to the BIV autumn survey 2024, 71.3 % of cleaning companies report higher sickness rates since sick notes became available by phone (source: bkvfirmenservice.de, as of 10/2026). These calls come early in the morning, usually in the hour before the shift starts. Empfango takes all of them, even when five people call at once.
When sick calls go through Empfango
Cleaning: 5:40 am, shift starts at 6
A cleaner calls in sick twenty minutes before the shift. Empfango answers, asks for name, site and shift and records how long the absence is expected to last. The site manager sees the report on their phone before they walk into the building.
Security: night shift drops out
At 9:30 pm an employee reports that he cannot start the night shift. Empfango records site, shift start and callback number and notifies dispatch immediately. Who organises cover is still decided by your operations lead; Empfango delivers the complete report without delay.
Several sick calls at the same time
Monday morning, flu season: four employees call between 5:30 and 6:00 am. Empfango runs all conversations in parallel, creates four separate cases and reports each one to the responsible site manager. No busy signal, no voicemail, no group chat.
What Empfango records for a sick call
Key facts, not a diagnosis
Empfango asks for name, site, shift, expected duration and callback number. It does not ask about the illness itself; the question set is limited to what shift planning needs.
Report to the right person
For each site or area you define who gets informed. Empfango sends the summary via WhatsApp, Telegram or email to the site manager or dispatcher and files the case with transcript in the dashboard. Via webhook the report also reaches your rostering software.
In the employee's language
Empfango is multilingual. Employees report in the language they are comfortable with. That reduces misunderstandings about site and shift, especially in teams where German is not the first language.
Capturing sick calls by phone: setup in three steps
Choose the sick-call number
Use your existing office number with call forwarding outside office hours, or set up a dedicated number for staff only. This number goes on the roster and into the staff briefing.
Define questions and recipients
In the dashboard you set which details Empfango asks for (name, site, shift, duration) and who receives the report per site: site manager, dispatch or both. The notice about the AI assistant and recording is built in.
Inform your staff
A notice on the board or a message to the team is enough: “Please report sick on this number, around the clock.” From the first call on, every report lands structured in the dashboard.
Why the 5:40 am sick call blocks the site manager's phone
Sick calls in commercial cleaning almost always arrive in the hour before the shift, between 5 and 7 am, and hit a site manager who is on the road at that time. The Blink blog describes the routine: “Especially in the early morning hours it means finding cover, reshuffling shifts or stepping in yourself. It is not unusual for site managers to start their day with several phone calls” (blink.de, 8 May 2025, as of 10/2026). Sickness absence in cleaning reached 29.1 calendar days per employee in Bavaria in 2023, the highest of all occupational groups (BKK Bayern via bkvfirmenservice.de, as of 10/2026).
Empfango separates the report from the response. The employee calls, Empfango answers, records the key facts and creates the case. The site manager receives the message with name, site, shift and expected duration and decides what to do. The call itself takes about a minute and costs nobody in the office any time. Organising cover and changing the roster stays with your operations lead; Empfango does not reschedule and does not call replacement staff.
The difference to voicemail: on voicemail the employee says “I'm sick” and hangs up. Which site, which shift, for how long? The site manager has to call back to find out. Empfango asks the follow-up questions during the call and delivers a complete record. The difference to the group chat: there, sick reports get buried between photos and shift-swap requests. With Empfango every report is its own case with a timestamp.
For companies with industry software, Empfango passes the report on via webhook. The rostering system receives a structured record with name, site, shift and period and can create an absence from it. If you use LiteLog, sick reports land directly as a note in the LiteLog portal for dispatch and operations. Without LiteLog or industry software, the Empfango dashboard with summary and transcript remains the system of record.
Little changes for the employee: they dial the usual number, hear a short notice that an AI assistant is speaking, and report sick. Empfango asks its questions, confirms the details and ends the call. Nobody has to wake the boss at 6 am, and nobody has to hope the voicemail gets heard in time.
Sick calls and GDPR: collecting health data sparingly
The fact that an employee is ill counts as health data under Art. 9 GDPR. Empfango therefore records only what shift planning needs: name, site, shift, expected duration and callback number. It does not ask about diagnosis or symptoms. Data minimisation here is not a setting but the question set itself.
Every call starts with a fixed announcement that an AI assistant is speaking and whether the call is recorded. This wording is hard-coded and not generated by the language model; it meets the notice requirements of Section 201 of the German Criminal Code (StGB), Art. 13 GDPR and Art. 50 of the EU AI Act. By default no audio is stored permanently; what remains is the transcript, which you can delete at any time.
Speech-to-text and the language model run in EU regions (Deepgram EU, Azure OpenAI EU); voice output via ElevenLabs is covered by a data processing agreement. The full list of sub-processors is in the privacy policy, and the DPA is included in every plan. The legal basis for processing sick reports in the employment relationship lies with you as the employer; Empfango acts as a processor.
Frequently asked questions about sick calls by phone
The employee calls the designated number. Empfango answers immediately, gives the AI notice, asks for name, site, shift and expected duration and confirms the details. The summary then goes via WhatsApp, Telegram or email to the site manager; the case sits in the dashboard with transcript.
No. Empfango only asks for what planning needs: who, which site, which shift, roughly how long. The illness itself is not discussed.
No. Empfango takes the sick report and passes it on. Organising cover, swapping shifts and changing the roster remains the job of your operations lead or your rostering software. Via webhook Empfango can hand the report over to that system.
Paula is the assistant of the industry software planD and, according to the vendor, requests replacement staff and releases the rescheduling after a sick call (pland.app/ki-assistenz, retrieved 14 Oct 2026). That requires planD as your rostering system. Empfango is independent of your software: it captures and reports the sick call and hands it via webhook to the system you use today.
Empfango records the caller's number and asks for the name. It does not match callers against your staff database automatically; the assignment is done by your site manager or your software based on the reported details.
Empfango handles any number of conversations in parallel. Every sick call gets its own case and its own notification. There is no busy signal and no hold queue.
Yes. Empfango is multilingual; you set the assistant's language in the settings. Employees who are not confident in German report more completely and with fewer follow-up questions.
Empfango starts at €99 per month as a flat rate with no overage, regardless of how many sick calls come in. Sick-call capture is not an add-on but a request like any other. All plans are listed on the pricing page.
