What is after-hours answering?
- After-hours answering
- After-hours answering is coverage for calls that arrive outside a business's opening times, including evenings, weekends and holidays, when nobody is at the desk to pick up.
What after-hours answering means in practice
The calls that arrive after five are not a quieter version of daytime ones. A dead boiler at eleven at night is a job somebody is ready to pay for.
They are also the least likely to leave a message. Someone with an urgent problem works down the list until a human or something like one picks up.
For trades and practices this single window often covers the whole subscription, which is why it is usually the first thing to switch on.
What people get wrong
One week of night calls, sorted
Say a plumbing shop tracks every call between 5:30 pm and 7:30 am for seven days and gets eleven. Three are real emergencies: a burst supply line, a sewer backup, and no hot water at a house with a newborn. Four are people who want to book routine work and happened to call after dinner. Two are existing customers checking on tomorrow's visit, and two are junk.
Only three of the eleven needed to wake anyone. The four routine callers are the interesting group, because without an answer they'd most likely have tried another plumber before morning. A week like that adds up to around 45 night calls a month, which sits comfortably inside GreetKeeper's Starter plan at $49 for 200 answered calls. Your own week will look different, so count it before you decide anything.
Check your own night volume first
Don't assume you have an after-hours problem. Open your carrier's online call log, or the call history in your VoIP dashboard, and filter two weeks of inbound calls to the hours you're closed. Count weekends separately, since Saturday morning often behaves more like a weekday than a night.
Now look at what happened to each call. How many left a voicemail? Of the numbers that didn't, how many called back the next day? Whatever's left is your real exposure, the people who tried once and went elsewhere.
A list with two entries a month means nights aren't where you're losing work, and you should run the same filter on noon to 1 pm instead. If it has fifteen, you've found the first thing worth switching on, and you've also got a baseline to compare against a month from now.
How GreetKeeper handles it
Out-of-hours calls can use their own greeting, their own routing and their own idea of what counts as urgent, separate from the working day.
Bookings made overnight land in your calendar for the morning, so you wake up to a filled calendar rather than a callback list.
A call costs the same at 2am as at 2pm. There is no night rate, and the overage rate on your plan is the only number that moves your bill.
After-hours questions
Should it book appointments overnight?
Yes, but set the earliest bookable slot deliberately. Otherwise a caller at 2am books eight o'clock the same morning and nobody is ready for them.
How do I handle public holidays?
Enter them in advance. A closure the assistant does not know about produces a confirmed booking nobody can honor, which is worse than not answering at all.
Do I have to be woken for emergencies?
Only for what you define as one. Everything else can wait as a message you read at seven, which is the whole point of separating the two paths.
Related terms
Hear it take one of your calls
Two minutes, your own scenario, no card.