Guides / out of hours

The 11pm call.

Someone with water coming through their ceiling does not wait for your opening hours to ring you. What happens next depends entirely on what you have set up, so here is exactly what happens with Anseya, hour by hour, including the part about your sleep.

What the caller gets

The divert does not keep office hours. A call at 11pm rings your phone first, exactly as a daytime call does, and goes to Anseya only after 15 seconds of no answer. The caller then hears the same opening sentence as every other caller: that this is an AI assistant, and that the call is recorded. In their own language, if they speak one of the tested ones.

What Anseya will not do at 11pm is promise things your rules do not allow. It books inside the hours you set and nowhere else. If you do not take night callouts, a caller demanding one is told, politely and honestly, what the earliest real option is. A machine that promises a 2am visit nobody agreed to has not answered your phone, it has volunteered you.

What reaches you, and when

Every call is written down and waiting for you in the morning, with its recording. The only question is which calls are allowed to make your phone ring at night, and Anseya divides that into three classes rather than one setting:

Emergencies are always delivered, at any hour of any day. A gas smell, a fire, a flood near the electrics: the alert is written, put at the top of your list and marked urgent the moment it happens. There is no setting anywhere that suppresses this, because the entire argument for putting an AI on a phone line is that somebody smelling gas at 3am gets an answer.
Whether the emergency also rings your phone is yours to decide. By default your quiet hours run 10pm to 6.30am and the alert waits silently at the top of your list. If you run a genuine 24-hour callout business, switch on 24-hour emergency callout and your phone rings at 3am, because for you that ring is the business model.
Everything else waits for morning. An urgent-but-not-dangerous job never wakes you, and a routine booking never rings your phone at any hour. You open your phone at 7am to the night's calls, qualified and in order, rather than to a noise at midnight that turned out to be a quote request.

Your customers are never messaged at night

The quiet hours above govern your own sleep, and you can adjust them. There is a second window you cannot adjust: Anseya never sends your customers messages between 8pm and 8am. That one is fixed on purpose. An emergency plumber choosing to be woken at 3am is running his business; his customer being texted a quote at 7am is having someone else's business run at them. The two windows are different domains, and only one of them belongs to you.

The honest comparison

Out of hours is where the alternatives differ most. Voicemail at 11pm collects the patient and loses the burst-pipe caller to whoever answers next. A human answering service at 11pm is paying somebody to be awake, and that appears in the price. Anseya at 11pm is the same software as at 11am, at the same £69 a month, with the same rules. The trade is the one on the AI receptionist page: the caller is told they are talking to a machine, and some callers will always want a person. Out of hours, the person was never on offer.

Fair questions

Does Anseya answer the phone at night?

Yes. The divert does not keep office hours. A call at 11pm is answered the same way as a call at 11am, in the caller's language, with the same AI disclosure first.

Will a night call wake me up?

Only if you choose that. An emergency is always delivered and always marked urgent, but whether your phone actually rings at night follows your quiet hours, 10pm to 6.30am by default, unless you switch on 24-hour emergency callout. Everything else waits for morning.

Can a caller book an out-of-hours visit?

Only if your rules allow one. Anseya books inside the hours and rules you set. If you do not do night callouts, it will not promise one, whatever the caller asks.