After-hours answering service: every evening call answered
An after-hours answering service picks up when your team has gone home — turning evening and weekend calls into messages, bookings and triaged emergencies instead of voicemails and lost customers.
The 5:31pm problem
Your ads, your website and Google do not switch off at 5:30. Callers who reach voicemail rarely leave one — they call the next result. After-hours cover is where "we never got back to them" stops happening.
How Odette handles out-of-hours
- Your schedule, not ours — set office hours per day in the dashboard; Odette behaves differently inside and outside them.
- Custom out-of-hours greeting — "We're closed until 8am, but I can help or take a message."
- Still answers questions — prices, services, opening hours, directions — from your website knowledge, at midnight.
- Emergency triage — urgent calls can transfer to your on-call mobile; the rest become tidy morning messages.
Related: 24/7 answering · what it costs.
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Start free trialFrequently asked questions
What is an after-hours answering service?
A service that answers your business calls when your team has gone home — evenings, weekends and holidays — so callers reach a helpful voice instead of voicemail. Messages and callback requests are sent to you for the morning, and genuine emergencies can be passed straight through.
How do calls reach the service after hours?
Either the service's number is your main line, or you set your existing number to divert on no-answer or on a schedule. With Odette you can point your number at it permanently — it transfers to your team in office hours and takes messages outside them.
Do after-hours services handle emergencies?
Yes — good ones triage. Odette asks what the call is about; routine matters become tidy messages for the morning, and urgent ones (a flood, a lock-out, an urgent patient) can be transferred to your on-call number if you enable it.