After hours
After hours means any call that reaches your business line outside the weekly working hours you set in the portal: evenings, nights and any day you mark closed. The portal has no holiday calendar, so a holiday on one of your working days counts as working hours. The agent still answers, and the call is tagged in the log and reports so you can see it separately from daytime traffic. How DispatchLine covers those hours is on the after hours answering service page.
Why it matters for a service company
A pipe does not check the clock before it bursts. The calls that arrive at 9 PM on a Tuesday or 6 AM on a Sunday are the ones a homeowner cannot wait on, which makes them the highest-value calls a shop gets and the ones most likely to ring out.
What happens next is mechanical. The homeowner with water on the kitchen floor is working down a list. If your line goes to voicemail, they do not leave a message and wait; they dial the next shop. By the time you check voicemail in the morning, the job is done by someone else, and the review that job would have earned went with it.
The usual fixes each cost something. Carrying the phone yourself means every night is an on-call night. An answering service takes a message but cannot book the job or tell the caller where the shutoff is.
How DispatchLine handles it
You set your working hours in the portal. Anything outside them is answered the same way, tagged as after hours, and handled under your emergency rules. Most owners start with conditional forwarding, so the line still rings them first during the day and hands the call to the agent when they do not pick up; at closing time, some switch to unconditional forwarding so nothing rings the truck. The free trial is a natural fit for exactly this pattern, after-hours or overflow forwarding.
For a night call the agent listens for your emergency keywords. On a gas smell, smoke, fire or a CO alarm it tells the caller to leave the building and call 911 before anything else. For a burst pipe or no heat it gives one safety instruction first, such as the shutoff or the breaker, then follows the action you chose: book the emergency slot and alert the on-call technician, live-transfer the call to a number you set and stay on the line until someone picks up, or take details and promise a callback. A routine request at 10 PM is booked into the next open arrival window on your board.
Booking and urgent alerts reach you by email today; text alerts to the owner are optional and need opt-in and program approval. Every call, day or night, lands in the portal with its outcome within about a minute, along with its recording, transcript and two-line summary whenever recording is on.
Related terms
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