Hours, transfers and escalation
Tell your AI receptionist when you're open, where to send callers who need a person, how to take a message, and how to get hold of someone in an emergency.
Your AI receptionist answers every call to its number, day or night. What changes after hours is what it tells callers and what it offers to do. You control that with your business hours, the tools you turn on, and your instructions.
Set your business hours
Business hours live in Settings → Business hours. You can keep more than one schedule (an hours set), for example "Sales hours" and "Support hours".
- Hours is your weekly schedule.
- Holidays are the days you're closed.
- Timezone is set per hours set. Without one, it uses your organization's timezone.
- One set is the Default set. Anything that doesn't name a schedule uses it.
Connect the receptionist to your hours
- Open the receptionist and go to Persona & Voice.
- Under Schedules, add your hours sets. The first one is what it assumes when a caller doesn't name a department. Add more so it can answer "what are your sales hours?" separately from support.
- On the Tools tab, turn on Check business hours. That's how it knows whether you're open right now.
- Say what to do after hours in your Instructions. For example: "When we're closed, don't transfer. Take a message and tell the caller we'll call back the next business day."
- Publish, then place a test call.
If you pick no schedule, the receptionist treats the line as always open, or follows your organization's default schedule if you have one.
Send callers to a person
Turn on the transfer tools you want on the Tools tab:
- Escalate to a human puts the caller through to a person or a call queue. Under Where escalations go, choose A person or team, A call queue, or One of several queues. With several queues, the receptionist picks one by name from what the caller needs, and only from your list.
- Transfer to extension hands the caller to an extension, a person or a team.
- Transfer to phone number forwards the caller to an outside number. You can limit it to a list of numbers you allow.
- Transfer to another assistant hands the caller to another AI receptionist on the same call. A summary of the conversation goes with them.
What callers hear: when the receptionist transfers to a person, the caller hears hold music while it rings, and goes to voicemail if nobody answers. A queue holds the caller with music until somebody in it picks up.
Briefing card. On the Policies tab, turn on Show a briefing card. The person who answers sees who's calling and why before they say hello.
Take a message
Take a message captures the caller's message. In its settings choose any of:
- Email to: addresses that get the message by email.
- Text (SMS) to: numbers that get it by text.
- Voicemail box: the box it lands in. The box's members are notified and see it in the Inbox.
Urgent calls
Two tools get hold of somebody without moving the caller off the line:
- Alert a teammate tells one person about the caller right away, for when they need to know now but the caller doesn't need to speak to them.
- Page the on-call person alerts whoever is on call, for a real emergency.
The caller stays with the receptionist while the alert goes out. That's on purpose: after hours the person you page may need a few minutes to respond.
Say in your Instructions what counts as urgent for your business, for example "a burst pipe or no heat is urgent; a quote request is not."
Schedule a callback
Schedule a callback puts a callback on your follow-up list with a time and the person the caller asked for. It's a good after-hours option when someone wants a call, not a message.
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