After-hours answering service
Fewer jobs lost to voicemail: it picks up after hours and texts you the details.
Book a free 20-minute call
How it works
- A call comes in after hours
- The receptionist gets the caller’s details
- You get a text with the details
- You decide: go tonight or call back in the morning
The problem
Every after-hours call that goes to voicemail is a job that may go to the next company on the list. An after-hours answering service picks those calls up, so you hear about the work and decide what’s worth going out for.
A lot of service calls come in after the office closes, and a lot of those are urgent. Someone has water on the floor or no heat, they call, it goes to voicemail, and they call someone else. You never find out the job existed.
A staffed answering service with live operators helps, and for some shops it’s the right answer. It can also get expensive, and the person answering doesn’t know your business.
What I set up
An automated receptionist that answers your line when you’re closed. It greets the caller with your business name, asks what’s wrong, gets their name, address and callback number, and sends you a text with the details. Saying up front that it’s automated is optional, but I recommend it, with something like “Hi, I’m Sam, an AI voice agent for [your business name].” You decide whether it’s worth going out tonight or calling back in the morning. I’m based in Ephrata and set this up in person for on-call trades there, in Moses Lake and around the Columbia Basin.
It follows the rules you set. If a burst pipe is an emergency and a dripping faucet isn’t, it can sort them that way and only wake you up for the first one. It’s the same idea behind the support platform I’m building for internet providers, where code, not the AI, sets the rules.
What you get
Every after-hours call answered and written down.
A text summary of each call, so you can decide in a few seconds.
A simple log of after-hours calls, which tells you how much work was coming in while you were closed.
Adjustments to the questions and rules after the first few weeks.
What it takes from you
- A conversation about which calls are emergencies and what you want to know from each caller.
- Your hours, service area and anything callers commonly ask.
- A change to how your phone forwards calls after hours. I walk you through it.
Honest limits
- Calls are only recorded with everyone’s OK. If yours are, the receptionist says so at the start, and callers can choose not to continue.
- It doesn’t diagnose problems, give prices or promise an arrival time unless you’ve set firm rules for those. It takes the details and hands the decision to you.
- Some callers will still want a person. It can offer to have you call them back first thing.
- This takes more setup than a website chat, because phone systems vary and the rules need testing before it goes live.
If daytime questions are the bigger problem, a FAQ and booking chatbot on your website covers those.
Here’s how working together goes, starting with a free 20-minute call.