Handle After-Hours Calls
Decide what happens at 9pm on a Sunday.
On this page
Your receptionist answers at 9pm on a Sunday whether you plan for it or not. This guide is about deciding what it should do at 9pm on a Sunday.
Evenings and Saturdays carry real volume
A meaningful share of calls arrive outside business hours — evenings and Saturday mornings especially. Those are the calls a traditional front desk loses entirely, and they’re often the urgent, higher-value ones.
With after-hours set up
Without a plan
With after-hours set up
Decide what should happen
There are three sensible policies. Most businesses use a mix.
- Capture and book
- It takes the details and books your first genuinely open slot. Right for the large majority of after-hours calls.
- Capture and flag urgent
- It takes the details and alerts you immediately, without promising a time. Right when you decide case by case.
- Transfer to a person
- It puts the caller through to whoever is on call. Right for genuine emergencies only — gas, flooding, no heat in freezing weather.
Don't route everything to your mobile
How to set it up
- 1
Set your real hours
Business Config → Hours. Everything outside these is after-hours. Get the time zone right — it’s the most common mistake.
- 2
Decide your default
For most trades, capture-and-book is right. Callers get certainty and you get a full diary in the morning.
- 3
Define what counts as an emergency
Be specific in Services — “no heat below freezing”, “gas smell”, “active leak”. Vague words like “urgent” get used by everyone.
- 4
Say what an after-hours call-out costs
If out-of-hours carries a premium, put it in Services so the caller hears it on the call rather than on the invoice.
- 5
Point alerts at the right phone
Owner alerts. If someone else is on call at weekends, send after-hours alerts to them.
Handling genuine emergencies
Set a transfer for your emergency list, pointing at the on-call phone. Everything not on that list gets captured and booked as normal.
Be direct about it. Your receptionist can tell the caller you don’t do out-of-hours emergency work and that someone will call at 7am. An honest no beats a promise you can’t keep.
Use capture-and-flag. It takes full details and alerts you immediately, so you decide whether to ring back — without the caller sitting in silence.
What the caller hears
A Sunday evening, closed
It never pretends you’re open. It says you’re closed, takes the details, and does the most useful thing available, which is usually a firm morning slot.
Only if you’d genuinely work them. Hours control which slots it can offer, so listing hours you don’t work means booking appointments you’ll have to cancel — which shows up as a falling hold rate.