A small rota cannot cover every night of the year
Two or three licensed directors, a county to cover, and a phone you have to answer at any hour. This is about how you cover the nights without anyone being permanently on duty.
Caller
“I'm calling about the service on Monday for my father. I know it's late, I couldn't sleep. Is the visitation still at four, and can we bring more flowers than we said?”
What happened next
- Confirmed Monday's visitation time from the service list the office maintains
- Read the chapel's wording on flowers and deliveries
- Recorded the caller's name against the family's record for the director
- No director woken, because this call did not need one
Most of the calls are not first calls
That's the part your rota gets wrong. Nights and weekends bring you first calls, but they also bring families who cannot sleep, relatives flying in, clergy, florists and a great many people asking what time something starts.
A director you wake for all of it is a director who is tired during the next morning's arrangements. In a firm of two or three licensed people, that fatigue sets how many families you can serve properly.
The traditional answer is a commercial answering service, and plenty of firms use one. Honestly compared: a person hears distress better than any assistant will, and a service reading from a card cannot tell your caller what time Monday's visitation starts. Whether that trade is worth it is yours to judge, and we'd rather say so than pretend your choice is obvious.
GreetKeeper answers your whole night, resolves the calls that have answers, and wakes your director for the ones that need one. Which is which is a list you write.
What wakes a director, and what does not
Firms differ on this more than you'd expect, so the list is yours. This is the shape most small firms settle into.
| Overnight call | Wakes the director | Otherwise |
|---|---|---|
| A death has occurred | Yes, always | Details taken, director reached while the caller is on the line |
| A care facility calling about a transfer | Yes | Facility, room and contact captured first |
| Family of a current case, distressed | Yes, if your rule says so | Many firms set this to escalate, and we would not argue |
| Service time, visitation, directions | No | Answered from the service list your office keeps current |
| Flowers, clergy, a soloist, a caterer | No | Logged with the family's name for the morning |
| Price inquiry from a stranger | No | General price list referred to, nothing quoted or discussed |
| Someone asking about a death that was not your firm's | No | Told plainly and kindly, no details given out |
Covering a night without a director on duty
Four things have to hold before you can trust this overnight, and none of them are technical.
The service list has to be current
Times, chapels, visitation hours, burial locations. It answers from what your office gave it, so a service you move on Friday afternoon has to be updated on Friday afternoon. That's the one discipline this asks of you.
The escalation list has to be honest
Write down which calls wake somebody, then read your transcripts for two weeks to see whether you got the list right. You'll probably move one or two lines once you've seen real calls.
The rota has to be reachable
It texts and calls whichever of your directors is on duty tonight, not all of them. If that person doesn't answer, it follows to whoever you nominated next, and that fallback is a setting to confirm on your demo.
Nothing is answered that should not be
Prices, arrangements, anything about the deceased's condition or how a transfer is carried out: none of it belongs in your script. It says one of your directors will call, and means it.
What night cover costs
Starter at $49 a month covers 200 answered calls at 45 cents each after, which is inside the range of a single-location firm. A firm with multiple chapels and a busier list usually runs Professional at $149 for 750 calls, then 35 cents.
The rate you pay for a call over the allowance is printed on the pricing page. Much of this field does not publish that number at all, and in a trade where a bad month means a busy one, it's worth knowing before you sign.
It is not a night director
What small firms ask
Can it cover only nights and weekends?
Yes, and that's the common setup. Your office answers during hours, your line forwards at close, and you take it back in the morning. You can also forward on no-answer while you're at a service.
What if two calls come at once on a Saturday night?
Ask about that on your demo and judge from what you see. We've chosen not to make a concurrency claim on these pages until it's properly confirmed, because an overstatement in your trade is not a small thing.
How does the director get the details?
Your director gets a text with the name, the place, the callback number and what was said, then the full transcript. At 3am the text is what matters; the transcript is for your file.
Can we use it for the daytime office phone too?
Plenty of firms do, for overflow while your staff are with a family or at a service. The script is the same, and your daytime calls are mostly the service-time questions in the table above.
What does it do with a call from a hospice at 2am?
It treats that as a first call: place, room, whether pronouncement has happened, and a contact. Then it reaches your director on duty while the nurse is still on the line, if that's how you set it.
Hear a Saturday night call handled
Your service list, your escalation rules, two minutes.