Pizza phones: how many lines, hold queues and people a pizza shop needs

Pizza phones are phone systems sold to pizza shops. The ones built for pizzerias add a hold queue so a caller waits when every line is taken, caller ID that shows on the POS, recorded specials during the wait, and backup internet. Before you buy one, count your busiest hour of calls. That count tells you how many lines and how many people you need.

The count matters because the two problems need different fixes. Callers who hear a busy signal need more lines. Callers who hold until they hang up need more people on the phone, or something else to take the order.

What kinds of pizza phone systems are there?

There are four kinds. Each vendor below is described from its own site.

Kind	What it does	Example and printed price	Start here if
Hold and queue box on your current lines	Answers when staff are busy, plays your message, and tells staff which line to pick up next	PizzaLine by iHoldMusic: $29.95 a month and a $100.00 sign-up fee on the monthly plan, for 1 to 4 regular phone lines	You want to keep your carrier and your handsets
Cloud phone system built for pizzerias	Internet phone lines with queues, hold messages, time-of-day routing, caller ID to the POS and cellular backup	PizzaCloud: $155.00 a month plus equipment for phones with cellular backup internet. PizzaPhones by Clarity Voice: no price on the page, quote on request	Callers hear busy signals, or your internet drops during service
People who answer for you	Phone specialists off site take the order, with software helping them	Tarro: no plan price on its pricing page	You want a person on every call and help with delivery
AI that takes the order	Software answers the call and takes the order	VOICEplug PizzaVOICE: no price on the page. Maple Pro: $350 a month billed monthly, or $220 a month billed yearly	Nobody is free to talk during the rush

For a general restaurant phone line, handsets and VoIP plans, see our guide to restaurant phone lines and VoIP. This page covers the pizza case: many short order calls packed into two or three hours.

How many phone lines does a pizza shop need?

Work it out from your own busiest hour. Your phone provider's call log or online portal should show calls by hour and how long each lasted.

1. Count the calls in your busiest hour, usually Friday or Saturday evening.
2. Find the average minutes a call ties up a line. Include time on hold, since a caller on hold still uses a line.
3. Multiply the two and divide by 60. The answer is the average number of calls going on at once.
4. Read the lines you need from the table below.

Worked example, with made-up numbers: 40 calls in the Friday 6 p.m. hour, averaging 3 minutes each, is 120 call minutes. Divided by 60, that is 2 calls at once on average.

The table uses the Erlang B formula, the standard phone traffic formula for the chance that a new caller finds every line busy. We ran the sums. With 2 calls at once on average, the chance of a busy signal is 40% with 2 lines, 21% with 3, 9.5% with 4, 3.7% with 5 and 1.2% with 6.

Average calls at once in your busiest hour	Lines to keep busy signals under 1 caller in 20	Chance of a busy signal with that many lines
1	4	1.5% with 4 lines
2	5	3.7% with 5 lines
3	7	2.2% with 7 lines
4	8	3.0% with 8 lines

The formula assumes callers who hear busy give up and do not call back. On a real Friday many redial, which adds load, so treat the table as a floor. Calls also bunch within the hour, so a 15-minute count at the peak gives a truer figure.

How many people need to be on the phone?

Every call on a line still needs someone to take the order, and one person can talk to one caller at a time.

In the worked example, 2 calls arrive at once on average. One person on the phone cannot keep up with that, however long the hold queue: callers arrive faster than one person can finish them, so the wait keeps growing until people hang up. A queue box helps when the average is below the number of people answering. It will not fix a rush that needs more people than you have on the phone.

When the average is above your phone staff, you have three choices: put more people on the phone at peak, send the overflow to an answering service, or have AI take the orders. Our guide to AI phone ordering for pizza shops covers what an AI agent must handle, such as half-and-half toppings and changes partway through an order.

What should callers hear while they wait?

Pizza Today (January 2023) notes that cloud systems let operators put upsell messages on hold, change them from a phone app, and trigger an offer when a wait runs long. PizzaLine announces which line staff should take next, first come, first served. Clarity lists custom ads and upsell messages while callers hold.

Keep the message short and current: the special you can actually make tonight, the wait time for delivery if it is long, and your online ordering link. Check it after every menu change.

What happens when the internet goes down?

Loss of the primary internet connection, a fault in the shop's local network and loss of power are different failures. A configured cellular backup may replace the upstream internet link; it does not by itself keep an unpowered phone or a failed local switch working. Clarity describes LTE failover for PizzaPhones. PizzaCloud's price page describes cellular backup for phones, POS, web orders and card payments. Those are vendor claims: confirm which devices and connections the quoted setup covers, and what happens to calls already in progress.

Ask the phone and network providers to agree on a controlled test method in a test setup or planned maintenance window. Keep the shared checkout network running during service; do not pull an unidentified cable. Separate upstream internet, local-network and power tests, and agree on how to restore each setup before starting. If a condition cannot be tested safely, mark it not tested.

For each test, record the affected equipment, expected fallback, a new ordinary call, an existing call, a staff transfer, the actual result and the recovery steps and time. Check the POS, online orders and payment path separately under their providers' approved methods; a connected phone does not prove a card payment was approved or an order reached the kitchen. Use ordinary test numbers, not 911. Our restaurant phone-system guide has the fuller outage record.

Should caller ID reach the POS?

Yes, if your POS supports the phone provider's caller ID connection. Clarity's current PizzaPhones page describes showing a caller's name and number on POS terminals and says no external caller ID box is required. That does not establish compatibility with every POS or a need to buy the older Watchdog device. PizzaCloud describes caller ID support for virtually all POS systems; confirm your exact POS and version with both vendors, then use an agreed test call to check what appears. Do not assume that a caller's number alone proves their identity or delivery address.

Can you keep your pizza shop's number?

Pizza Today advises making sure you own your number so you can keep it if you change vendors. A cloud system usually means moving (porting) the number to the new provider. PizzaLine sits on your existing lines, so the number stays with your carrier. Our guide to switching answering services covers porting versus forwarding, and the call forwarding checklist covers testing where calls go.

What should you check before you sign?

1. Your busiest-hour call count and average call length, from the call log.
2. How many calls the system takes at once, and what caller number six hears.
3. Who owns the number, and the steps to leave.
4. Whether caller ID reaches your POS, tested with a real call.
5. Separate upstream internet, local-network and power failures, with results from the provider-approved test or a clear not-tested note.
6. Monthly price, equipment, setup fees and contract term, in writing.
7. Reports on hold time and hang-ups. PizzaCloud lists these as standard.
8. Who answers when you need more hands than you have: staff, a service or AI.

If the answer to the last item is AI, Maple Pro takes phone orders into supported POS systems, including Toast, Square, Clover and SkyTab (now Shift4 Dine). Check your system on the integrations list and test the full order path described on the product page before you move your live number.

Published by Maple. This AI-assisted guide combines vendors' own product and price pages, a Pizza Today buyer's article and our own Erlang B calculation with made-up inputs. It does not rank vendors, report a test of any system, or promise a result for your store.