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A fully booked day is the goal, right up until the front desk phone rings and every hand in the building is busy. The caller gets four rings and a voicemail beep, and you get a missed booking you'll never hear about. The fix is the part you can control: where that call goes when your team can't grab it.
Call forwarding tells your phone line to send incoming calls to a different number instead of, or after, ringing your own phone. Turn it on and a call to your salon's number can land on a manager's cell, a second location, an answering service, or a voicemail box you actually check. Verizon and most other carriers include it at no extra monthly cost on standard plans, and every modern smartphone has the setting built in. On an iPhone it lives under Settings, then Apps, then Phone, then Call Forwarding, per Apple's support guide.
The point isn't to shuffle calls around for its own sake. It's to make sure a ringing phone always ends somewhere a person or a system can turn it into a booking, even when the chair-side team can't stop mid-color to answer.
The phone is still how most people reach a local business. In BrightLocal's research on local search, phone calls rank among the outcomes businesses care about most, and roughly 60% of customers say they'd rather call a small business than email it or fill out a form. For a salon, a call is usually a client with a date in mind and a card ready to hold it.
Voicemail doesn't catch them. Industry data collected by Aira puts the share of callers who hang up rather than leave a message at around 80%, and most of those never ring back. They do the obvious thing instead and dial the next salon on the list. Estimates of the damage pile up quickly, with some 2026 analyses putting the yearly revenue a busy service business loses to unanswered calls in the tens of thousands of dollars. The call you didn't forward is the booking a competitor answered.
There are two ways to route calls, and a salon usually wants both, at different times of day.
Unconditional forwarding sends every call straight to the other number without ringing your phone at all. On most carriers you switch it on by dialing *72 followed by the ten-digit destination, then cancel it with *73. Verizon lays out the exact steps in its call forwarding FAQs. This is the setting for when the salon is closed, the desk is unstaffed, or you want a service to handle everything for a stretch.
Conditional forwarding lets your phone ring first and only hands the call off when the line is busy, nobody picks up after about four rings, or the phone is switched off. The North American code for it is usually *71, and carriers like AT&T let you set separate rules for a busy line versus an unanswered one. Conditional forwarding is the version most salons run during open hours: the desk gets first crack at every call, and the ones that slip through still go somewhere useful instead of a dead-end voicemail.
Smartphones keep forwarding in the call settings. Apple's guide walks through the iPhone path under Settings and the Phone app, where a single toggle turns it on and shows the number your calls are going to. Android phones have the same option inside the Phone app's settings, though the wording shifts a little by carrier. One catch worth remembering: Apple notes you have to be in range of the cellular network at the moment you switch forwarding on, or it won't take.
If your salon uses a Google Voice number, forwarding happens in the app rather than with star codes. You can point calls at one or more linked phones, and Google's help center covers both linking a phone to receive calls and the custom forwarding rules that decide which calls ring where. VoIP business lines work the same way, with forwarding set in a web dashboard instead of on the handset.
You can also manage forwarding from your account rather than the phone itself. Verizon lets you turn it on through My Verizon or with the star code, and AT&T's wireless support covers the same for its plans. Setting it at the carrier level is handy when the phone that normally answers is out of the building.
Forwarding solves where the call goes. It doesn't decide whether the call becomes a booking. Send it to another voicemail box and you're back to the 80% of callers who hang up instead of leaving a message. Send it to a staff cell and you're asking someone to answer strangers' calls between clients or on a day off, which rarely holds up for long.
Speed is the whole game here. The Harvard Business Review study The Short Life of Online Sales Leads found that firms answering a new lead within an hour were far likelier to actually connect with it than those that waited, and a live phone call is about as hot as a lead gets. An answering service can take a message, but a generic call center usually can't see your calendar, quote your prices, or book the 90-minute balayage a caller is asking about. That's the gap an AI receptionist closes. A tool like Callpad picks up on the first ring in your salon's own voice, knows your services and hours, and books the appointment into your calendar, so a forwarded call becomes a filled slot instead of a note someone reads back three hours later. Forwarding gets the call there; the receptionist is what closes it.
Put the two forwarding types on a schedule that matches how the salon actually runs:
Forwarding fails quietly. Once it's set, call your salon number from a phone that isn't linked to the line and check that it lands where you expect, on the ring you expect. Do it again after any carrier or number change. A rule you set up months ago and never checked is exactly the sort of thing that drops a Saturday-morning caller into a voicemail loop while your book has openings.
