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Inbound

After-hours answering.

Picks up calls outside your business hours, triages urgency, books emergencies or takes a message.

Goal

Triage the caller's reason. If it's a real emergency (water gushing, no power, gas leak, blocked drain causing flooding), offer the on-call callout. Otherwise capture a clear message and confirm when you'll call back.

Triggers

  • Inbound call outside the business hours you set in onboarding
  • Holidays and weekends (unless you've configured them as open)
  • Intent keywords like 'emergency', 'urgent', 'burst pipe', 'no power' even mid-business-hours (so you don't miss a genuine 999)

What the AI does

  • Discloses AI + recording in the opening line
  • Identifies returning callers from caller-id and reads back their last job
  • Asks the capture-fields you've defined per work type (e.g. 'which drain', 'since when', 'is it backing up')
  • Books an on-call callout when the work type is flagged as emergency-eligible
  • Takes a structured message with name, callback number, address, and the problem in their words
  • Confirms a callback time during your next business window

What the AI won't do

  • Quote prices for unfamiliar work
  • Send anyone out for non-emergency jobs at 11pm
  • Promise a specific staff member without checking availability
  • Skip the disclosure for 'known' callers

Tools available to the AI

lookup_customer_historylookup_addresscheck_service_areacreate_job (emergency callouts)create_message_for_ownerschedule_callbacktransfer_to_oncall

Tools are typed and bounded — the AI calls them, it doesn't define them. Each tool call is logged with an idempotency key, so retries never produce duplicates.

Success looks like

You wake up to a tidy SMS digest: emergencies actioned with named on-call, non-emergencies captured as messages with names and numbers, nobody got dead air or voicemail.

Toggle

Dashboard → Workflows → After-hours answering · on/off. Pauses just this workflow; inbound business-hours and outbound campaigns continue.

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