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.
Careful. Check your hours after any seasonal change. Bank holidays and Christmas closures are the most common cause of calls being answered as if you were open.
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.
Careful. Route urgent categories to a monitored human channel. Configure escalation triggers for them explicitly rather than assuming the AI will recognise urgency.