Out-of-hours handling — catching customers while you're asleep or on a job
Configure Voxinly to cover after-hours enquiries, voicemail fallback, SMS notifications and the morning return-call window. The setup that turns an 11pm 'will they remember?' into a 9am booked job.
British trade customers are not on a 9-to-5 schedule. They notice the leak at 10pm when they go to brush their teeth. They realise the boiler is dead on a Sunday morning. They sit down after dinner and start ringing round for a quote. If you only answer the phone during business hours, you're missing 60% of the demand — most of it served by whichever competitor picked up first.
Out-of-hours handling is the single most under-used Voxinly feature. Set it up properly and the chatbot collects everything a customer would have told you on the phone, books a return-call slot, and posts the full summary to your inbox before you wake up. The customer feels heard. You wake up to a hot lead and a name to dial.
Step 1 — Set your business hours
Open Availability settings
Navigate to /admin/chatbot → Availability. Set your standard hours per day. Most British trades use 7:30am-6pm Monday-Friday and 8am-1pm Saturday with Sundays off, but anything goes — the chatbot adapts.
Step 2 — Configure the out-of-hours message
Customise the after-hours opener
In the 'After-hours greeting' field, write what you want the chatbot to say when a customer arrives outside business hours. The default is good — 'Hi, thanks for getting in touch. We're closed at the moment but I can take everything you'd tell us tomorrow morning and book you a callback. What's the job?'
The key word is 'callback'. Customers tolerate being told 'we're closed' if there's a clear promise of when you'll be back to them. They don't tolerate 'we'll be in touch' or 'somebody will get back to you'.
Step 3 — Choose the callback windows
Offer 2-3 specific windows
Don't offer a free-text time. Offer a small menu — 'before 9am', '9-11am', 'lunchtime', 'after 4pm'. The customer picks one and Voxinly logs it as a callback task in your dashboard. Tighter windows convert better than 'whenever suits you'.
Step 4 — Voicemail fallback
Some customers don't want to chat. They want to leave a voice message and go to bed. Enable 'Voicemail fallback' in the Availability settings and Voxinly offers a 'just leave us a quick voice message' option in the chat after a couple of exchanges. Recordings post to your email and an SMS notification fires immediately.
Step 5 — SMS notification for hot leads
Enable urgent-SMS in /admin/notifications
For any out-of-hours conversation that contains an urgency signal — 'no heat', 'flooding', 'gas smell', 'kids in the house' — Voxinly fires an SMS to your mobile within 30 seconds. You decide if you want to ring them back tonight or wait until morning. Either way, you knew.
Step 6 — The morning return-call ritual
When you open your dashboard in the morning, the overnight conversations are queued at the top with: customer name, job, postcode, urgency, the chat summary, and the time-window they asked to be called back in. Tradesmen who block out 7:30-8:30am for return calls book the bulk of their day's work before the van leaves the drive.
Coverage patterns by trade
| Trade | After-hours pattern | Voicemail? |
|---|---|---|
| Plumber (no 24hr) | Chatbot collects, return-call window 7:30-9am | Yes — leaks generate panic |
| Gas engineer | Chatbot collects + urgent SMS for 'no heat'/'gas smell' | Yes |
| Sparky | Chatbot collects, callback after 5pm next day | Optional |
| Joiner / builder | Chatbot collects, callback within 24hr | Off |
| 24hr emergency firm | Live phone handoff, SMS notify, chatbot as backup | Off |
FAQ
How much extra work does this actually catch?
Across 80 Voxinly trade customers, 62% of all chat-widget conversations arrive outside 9-5 Mon-Fri. Of those, 41% lead to a booked job when handled properly. That's roughly a quarter of the total weekly book from after-hours alone.
Should I ring back urgent ones at night?
Your call. We see two patterns: tradesmen who advertise '24hr emergency' do; tradesmen who don't, wait until morning and explain politely. Both work. The mistake is silently leaving the message unanswered.
What if the customer is rude in the chat after hours?
Rare — late-night customers are usually anxious, not aggressive. Voxinly is trained to de-escalate and to flag genuinely abusive messages so you can ignore them. Don't return-call those.
Does the chatbot keep working during bank holidays?
Yes — set bank holidays in the Availability page (or sync to UK bank holiday calendar) and the after-hours mode applies all day.