What is time-of-day routing?

Time-based rules are the oldest in phone systems and still the most used. Office hours go to the desks, evenings go somewhere else.

Edges are where it breaks. A rule ending at five o'clock can cut off a caller who dialed at 16:59, unless the handover lets live calls finish.

Time zones make it worse. A rule written in your local time behaves oddly for callers two zones away. Daylight saving then shifts the boundary twice a year without asking.

Weekends and holidays are usually separate rules rather than part of the daily one, which is why a holiday nobody updated is such a common failure.

Take a hypothetical physical therapy clinic. Ask the owner for the hours and you'll hear eight to five thirty. Write the routing table and it grows.

Monday through Thursday, 8:00 to 12:00 goes to the front desk. From 12:00 to 1:00 the desk is at lunch, so calls need another path. Then 1:00 to 5:30 is back to the desk. Friday runs 8:00 to 1:00 only. Saturday is closed except the first one of the month, when there's a morning clinic. Add evenings, Sundays, the holiday list, and the two days a year when the whole staff is away at off-site training.

That's nine rows for a business that thinks it has one schedule. The lunch row is the one most often missing. It covers the hour when patients on their own lunch break are most likely to call. A clinic with a day rule and a night rule is sending that hour to a ringing desk.

Two details decide whether a schedule behaves, and neither shows up until it fails.

First is the order rules are checked in. Most phone systems test the holiday list first, then one-off overrides, then the weekly pattern. If yours checks the weekly pattern first, Thanksgiving is just a Thursday and the desk phones ring in an empty office. Test it by adding tomorrow as a fake holiday and calling in.

Second is the clock. A hosted system runs on a server that may sit in another time zone, and the schedule follows whatever zone is set on your account. Check that it names your zone and that it adjusts for daylight saving on its own.

Put five test calls on the calendar after any change: a minute before closing, a minute after, mid-lunch, Saturday morning and the next holiday. Make the calls from a phone that isn't on your system, because internal calls often skip the schedule entirely.

You set your hours and the assistant covers what falls outside them, or every hour if you prefer.

Callers hear a greeting that matches the actual time rather than a recording claiming the office is open when it is not.

Each number can have its own hours, greeting and calendar under one account, which suits a business with more than one location. You can also set closure dates, and it answers as closed on those days.