Glossary
What is after-hours routing?
What happens to a call at 11 p.m. on a Saturday, and how to decide it on purpose.
The short answer
What is after-hours routing?
After-hours routing is the set of rules that decides where calls go when your business is closed: evenings, weekends and holidays. The phone system checks the time against your schedule and sends the call somewhere other than its daytime destination, such as a closed message, voicemail, an on-call phone, an answering service or an AI receptionist. Good after-hours routing separates urgent calls from the ones that can wait until morning.
How to set it up
- 1Set your business hours and holidays in your phone system or carrier settings.
- 2Choose where calls go outside those hours.
- 3Decide what counts as urgent, and who is on call to take it.
- 4Decide how non-urgent requests reach the team the next morning.
Example
A property management company closes at 6 p.m. At 11 p.m. a tenant calls about water coming through the ceiling. After-hours routing sends the call to an AI receptionist, which recognizes a leak as urgent under the company's rules and dials the on-call maintenance manager inside the same call. A tenant who calls at midnight about a parking permit gets an answer, and the request waits for the office in the morning.
What it means for a small business
With Daber AI, calls can route to the agent outside business hours, or the agent can answer around the clock, whichever you configure. It closes routine requests on the spot, such as hours, prices, booking or rescheduling. A case that matches your urgency rules is escalated to whoever is on call, and everything else is captured with a summary for the morning, so the team starts with a list of requests rather than a list of missed calls.
Questions
Is voicemail enough after hours?
It's the cheapest option, and fine if few calls come in at night and none are urgent. The risk is that a caller with an urgent problem, or a new customer comparing businesses, hangs up instead of leaving a message and calls someone else.
Can an AI receptionist answer only after hours?
Yes. You can route only calls outside business hours to the agent, while your team keeps answering during the day. It's an easy way to start and see the results before you widen it.
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