What happens to calls when my business is closed?

Four things can happen, and only one of them books work. A call that arrives while you are closed goes to voicemail, rings out unanswered, forwards to somebody's mobile, or gets answered. BotsDontSleep answers it on the first ring in under one second, 24/7, at $0.60 CAD per answered minute billed by the second: it books the appointment when that is what the caller wants, escalates when the call is an emergency, and writes down the rest, with a transcript and a summary waiting for you at eight in the morning. The closed sign on your door does not reach your phone. The phone rings the same whether anything is on the other end of it or not.

How many hours a week is your business actually closed?

A nine-to-five, Monday to Friday, is open 40 hours out of 168. That leaves 128 hours a week, about 76% of it, when your line rings into whatever you set up once and stopped thinking about.

Across a year: 8,760 hours, 2,080 of them inside that schedule, 6,680 outside it. Then take out the holidays. Ontario's Employment Standards Act names nine public holidays, and whether you close on all nine is your call, but each one you close is another day of calls arriving at a dark office. Take out the two weeks you are away in July, and the hour the shop is at lunch.

The overnight stretch is the quietest part of that gap. The expensive part is the shoulder: the half hour before opening, the hour after closing, Saturday morning. That is when somebody who has just decided to book something picks up the phone, gets nothing, and calls the next name on the list.

What are the four things that can happen to a call after closing?

Voicemail, a ring-out, a forward, or an answer. Three of them produce nothing.

Voicemail takes the call and keeps it. The caller has to decide to leave a message, say something useful, and then wait for you, which is three decisions in a row that somebody comparing two plumbers has no reason to make. What you get is audio to listen through in sequence, with no urgency marker and no way to sort the emergency from the wrong number.

A ring-out is the most common by accident. Nobody set anything up, so the line rings twenty times and stops. The caller learns only that you did not answer.

A forward to a mobile is free and instant, and it also means your phone rings at 11pm for a robocall. Within a month the forward gets switched off at night and nobody remembers to switch it back on. It is a coverage plan that depends on somebody being willing to be interrupted forever.

An answer is the only one that moves anything. A staffed service or an AI receptionist picks up, establishes who is calling and what they need, and either handles it or gets it to the right person. What such a call can actually finish is set out in what an after-hours call can complete.

What does a night of answered calls actually cost?

Use two minutes as a planning figure for an average call, not a measured one, and the arithmetic is small enough to do in your head.

Six calls across an evening and overnight, two minutes each, is 12 minutes. At $0.60 CAD a minute that is $7.20, so thirty nights is about $216 a month, with no setup fee and no monthly minimum. The same 12 minutes on a staffed service at the general Canadian market range of $1.50 to $3.00 per minute runs $18 to $36 a night, or roughly $540 to $1,080 a month. That range is the market rather than any one provider's published card, so check their own pricing page for current figures before setting it against ours.

The comparison that decides it is not the staffed one. It is voicemail, which is free. If one booked job a month is worth more than $216 to you, the answered nights paid for themselves on the first call. If your average job is worth $80 and you gain one a month, they did not. That number is one you know and we do not. The rest of the arithmetic sits in the answering service cost breakdown.

Robocalls are the part people forget to price. A wrong number lasting 20 seconds costs about 20 cents, and fourteen in a week is roughly $4.20. A rounding error, but a real line on the bill.

Can a closed-hours call be finished, or only written down?

Finished, in most cases, and that is the difference between an answering service and an answer.

Five things can complete at 2am with nobody awake. A booking written into your calendar against your real availability. A question about hours, parking, price or whether you cover a postal code. Intake for a quote, with every field you asked for. An emergency judged against your own rules and escalated to whoever is on call. A text with a booking link or directions, sent while the caller is still on the line.

What cannot complete is anything that needs you: a price you have to see a site to quote, a decision about whether to take a job at all, a complaint that has gone past the point where a script helps. Those get captured, marked, and put in front of you first thing. Worse than handling them live. Far better than a voicemail nobody sorted.

One category we refuse rather than fail at is card numbers. We do not take payment card details on calls, because a card number read aloud lands in a recording and a transcript. Callers who want to pay get a payment link by text.

How do the options compare when the office is dark?

The underrated row is the second from the bottom. Coverage over Christmas and over a two-week holiday is where every rota-based plan quietly falls apart, because the plan was built around people who are also away.

What about holidays, lunch hours and the weeks you are away?

One setting, written once: your hours, your exception dates, and what happens inside each of them.

Weekly hours come first, per day, with the gaps named rather than assumed, because lunch is a closure and the phone does not know that. Exception dates come second: the nine Ontario holidays if you take them, inventory days, the Friday of a long weekend. A vacation block comes third, usually with a different escalation rule, since the person who normally takes emergencies is the one who is away.

Each layer gets its own script and transfer rule. A dental clinic can hold evening booking calls for the morning and still put a caller with a broken tooth through to the emergency line, which is how evening booking calls for Montreal dental clinics are usually set up. An HVAC company in January can hold nothing: an overnight no-heat call in Edmonton is dispatched tonight or lost to whoever answered next. Same product, opposite rules, and the rules are the part you write. Building the calendar itself is covered in setting the hours an answering service works inside.

Changing any of it is a message to us, not a config screen. Launch takes about a week from the first conversation; changes after that land the same day.

When is closed-hours answering not worth paying for?

Four cases where the honest answer is to keep your money.

If almost nobody calls when you are closed, this solves a problem you do not have. Pull a month of call logs first, count what arrived outside your hours, and if the answer is five calls and two were robocalls, the thing to fix is something else.

If your buyers are other businesses who only ever call between nine and five, closed-hours coverage is insurance against an event that does not occur. A commercial supplier selling to purchasing departments is in a different position from a plumber.

If you already run an on-call rota with people who answer reliably and get paid for it, you have solved this. An AI line can sit in front of that rota and screen what reaches the phone at 3am, which is a real improvement. It is an improvement, not a rescue.

And if your callers want you specifically, because the relationship is the product, a stranger answering in your place can cost more than a voicemail would have. Some solo consultancies and family practices are in this position. A recorded message in your own voice, promising a callback by a stated hour, beats a smooth answer from anybody else.

There is a fifth case that is not about the product. If the messages arrive and nobody reads them, answering overnight changes nothing except your bill. Whoever picks up the morning list has to be named before you switch anything on, and it cannot be whoever gets in first.

How do you set up closed-hours coverage this week?

Five steps, and about an afternoon of your time.

1. Count what actually arrives while you are closed. One month of call logs, split into evenings, overnight, weekends and holidays, with robocalls marked separately. Guessing this number is how people buy the wrong thing.
2. Write down your real hours, including the gaps. Per day, plus lunch, plus the days you close and the weeks you are away. Name the closures rather than leaving them to be inferred.
3. Decide what gets interrupted for, and who takes it. Three situations, not ten, and a first, second and third number for each. Most escalation failures are one destination with a full voicemail box.
4. Write the closed-hours script and the booking rules. What the caller hears, which questions get asked, what can be booked without a person, and what is held for the morning.
5. Test it from outside, twice. Once after closing and once around one in the morning, from a phone the system does not recognize. Say the emergency phrase from step three and see whether the call goes where you said it would.

Then read the morning summaries for a fortnight and change what is wrong, because something will be. Ours answers on +1 437-494-9110 if you would rather hear a closed-hours call handled on a line that is not yours. If you are still deciding whether the gap is worth covering, what an after-hours answering service is starts a step further back, and the after-hours answering service page has the coverage detail.