What hours should an AI receptionist cover?

Lunchtime is the surprise for most owners. A single person covering a phone means an hour a day where nobody picks up.

Out of hours is the obvious one and often not the largest. It depends heavily on the trade.

The data is in your carrier's log, and one month of it settles the question better than any reasoning from first principles.

Out of hours only. Your team answers during the day and the assistant covers evenings, weekends and holidays. Suits businesses whose daytime coverage is genuinely solid.

Overflow during the day. Calls ring your phone first and divert when busy or unanswered. This is the setting most small businesses should start with.

Everything. The assistant answers first on every call and transfers when needed. Suits businesses where the phone constantly interrupts skilled work.

You can change between them, and most people move from the second to the third after reading a month of transcripts. The move usually follows a week where the phone interrupted something expensive.

Whatever you pick, test the after-hours path deliberately. It runs when nobody is around to notice it is broken.

Say you run a pool service company and you're sure evenings are the problem. You pull June's unanswered calls from your carrier and sort them by hour. There are 147 in total.

Weekends account for 44 and weekday evenings from 5 to 7pm for another 38, so you were partly right. But 31 were missed between noon and 1pm and 22 between 7 and 8am, before the office opens and while homeowners are looking at a green pool over breakfast. The remaining 12 were scattered.

So 82 misses were after hours and 53 came in windows you thought were covered or hadn't considered. An evenings-and-weekends setup would have left more than a third of the problem in place. No-answer forwarding, left on around the clock, catches all 147 without anyone having to predict when the gaps fall.

Your options depend on what your line can do. With a VoIP system that has schedules, you can switch modes by the clock. A mobile or landline with conditional forwarding does overflow well. If your line offers only forward-everything, that leaves you with all or nothing, or with dialing a code when you lock up and another when you open. That manual version works until the first morning someone forgets, and then the assistant answers all day when you didn't intend it to.

Coverage also changes which plan you need, because it changes how many calls get answered. Say the pool company gets 600 inbound calls a month and misses 147. With overflow only, the assistant answers about 147 calls, which fits comfortably inside Starter at $49. If it answers everything first, that's 600 calls and Professional at $149. Both are reasonable choices, but work out the sum before you flip the setting.

Revisit the decision each season. A pool company's July looks nothing like its January, and an accountant's March has little in common with her August. Whatever pattern of missed calls you measured, it only holds for the month you measured it in.

Billing is per answered call rather than per hour, so covering more hours does not cost more unless more calls arrive.

Starter is $49 for 200 answered calls with $0.45 a call after that, and booking is included rather than gated to a higher tier.

Each number can have its own hours, greeting and calendar under one account, and you can set closure dates so it answers as closed on those days.