After hours and voicemail
What SIMCOAI does when you are closed, and how to make sure out-of-hours calls still turn into work you can act on.
Opening hours drive everything
SIMCOAI uses the opening hours in your business profile to decide whether a call is in or out of hours. If those are wrong, everything downstream is wrong.
Out-of-hours options
| Option | What the caller gets | Best for |
|---|---|---|
| Answer as normal | Full AI handling, work captured for the morning | Businesses whose enquiries are not time-critical |
| Answer with a closed message | Told you are closed, message still captured | Most businesses |
| Capture and escalate | Message captured and flagged urgent | Lines where some issues cannot wait |
| Transfer to an on-call number | Routed to whoever is on call | Genuine emergency lines |
What gets captured
An out-of-hours call still produces a record: transcript, contact details, what they wanted, and any workflow it created. It is waiting in the dashboard when you open.
Expected result
You start the day with a list of overnight enquiries, each with enough detail to act on without ringing back for basics.
Be careful with urgent claims
If your business handles anything genuinely urgent — safety, medical, vulnerable customers — do not rely on an AI front desk to triage it out of hours.
Partial-day closures are handled precisely
A closure entered for part of a day — staff training from 2pm to 3pm, say — is treated differently from the whole day being shut, and the caller is told the accurate version of each.
| Closure covers | What the caller is told |
|---|---|
| The whole day | That day is closed for appointments, with the reason if one was given, and the nearest bookable date is offered instead. |
| Part of the day | That day is bookable except for the closed window, with the reason if one was given — the caller is never told the whole day is shut, and never offered a time inside the closed window. |
See also
- Phone profiles - opening hours live on your business profile, not on the number itself
- Escalations - configuring which topics always reach a person, in or out of hours
- Call transfers - what happens when a transfer is triggered out of hours