An after hours answering service that picks up when you've gone home

It's 7:40 on a Tuesday evening. You've closed up, you're cooking, and the work phone buzzes on the counter. Someone wants to book for Saturday. You can answer it and lose the evening, or leave it and hope they ring again tomorrow. Most of the time they don't. They ring the next business on the list, the one that answered.

That's the problem an after hours answering service exists to solve: customers don't keep office hours. They call on their lunch break, after the kids are in bed, on Sunday morning when they finally get round to it. Klugon covers those hours with an AI voice that answers in your business's name, books appointments into your calendar, answers the routine questions and writes down everything your team needs to call people back. It doesn't need a night shift, a rota or a premium rate for bank holidays.

This page is about using Klugon specifically for the hours you're closed: how to send it only the calls you want it to take, what it handles overnight, what it leaves waiting for you in the morning and what it costs compared with paying people to cover evenings and weekends. It's also honest about the things an AI can't do at 2am, which matter more out of hours than at any other time.

What a good after hours answering service has to do

Before looking at the product, it helps to agree what "covered" means. Out of hours, the person on the other end of the line usually has one of four needs:

1. A quick answer. Are you open on Saturday? Do you take walk-ins? Is there parking? These callers just need a correct answer and they're done.
2. A booking. They want to come in, and they want to sort it now while they're thinking about it. If they have to call back during the day, a fair number won't.
3. A conversation with you. A quote, a complaint, a question only you can answer. They need to know that someone will get back to them, and you need their details in full.
4. Help right now. Something has gone wrong and they can't wait. This is the hardest group, and the one where an answering service most needs to be honest about what it is.

Any after-hours cover, human or AI, should handle the first three without fuss and have a clear, safe answer for the fourth. Leaving it to voicemail handles none of them well: people don't like leaving messages, and the ones they do leave tend to be "it's Dave, call me back" with a number that cuts out halfway.

How Klugon works as an after hours answering service

Klugon is an AI phone receptionist. During the day it can answer every call or just the ones you miss; out of hours it does the same job with nobody behind it until the morning. The AI phone receptionist page covers the whole product. Here's what matters for evenings, nights and weekends.

A 24/7 AI receptionist, as long as calls reach it

The AI answers any call that reaches your Klugon number, at any hour, as long as your voice plan is active. There's no setting for "closed" and no voicemail fallback inside Klugon. Bank holidays, Christmas Day and the middle of the night are all the same to it.

That's useful, but it means the decision about which calls it answers sits with your phone line, not with Klugon. If your existing number forwards every call to Klugon, it answers every call, day and night. If your number only forwards the calls you don't pick up, it answers only those. You set this up with your phone provider's call forwarding, and the next section shows the three common patterns.

What it can do overnight

On a call, the AI can:

• Answer questions from your business profile (address, opening hours, contact details), your services and prices, and your knowledge base.
• List your services, check which slots are free, book an appointment and give the caller a reference.
• Cancel an existing booking.
• Search your product catalogue.
• Take the caller's name, number and what they need, and save it as a lead for your team.

Bookings follow the rules you've set in Klugon's built-in calendar: your opening hours, how long each service takes, which staff member does it, buffers between appointments, the minimum notice you need and the dates you're closed. So a caller at 11pm can book a slot for tomorrow afternoon, but not one that starts in forty minutes, unless you've told it that's fine. The AI appointment booking page explains the booking rules in more depth.

What it can't do overnight

• It can't put the caller through to anyone. There's no live transfer and no way for the AI to ring your mobile or an on-call phone.
• It can't send anything. No text messages, no confirmation emails, no reminders. The caller gets their booking reference during the call.
• It doesn't alert you by email or push notification. On the Business plan and above, new leads and bookings are posted to Slack or Zapier; on Starter, they wait in your dashboard.
• It can't reschedule a booking on a call. It can cancel one and it can book a new one.

These shape how you should set it up, especially if any of your callers have genuine emergencies.

Three ways to route calls out of hours

There are three sensible ways to decide which calls the AI takes. All three use your phone provider's forwarding, and you can switch between them later.

Pattern 1: forward only the calls you don't answer

Set your line to forward calls when you don't pick up (carriers call this "no answer", "no reply" or "conditional" forwarding). Your phone rings as usual. If you answer, the AI never hears about it. If you don't, after a few rings the call goes to Klugon.

The neat thing about this pattern is that it covers out-of-hours without you doing anything at closing time. At night, nobody answers, so every call goes to the AI. In the day, it only takes the calls you're too busy for. It's the pattern we'd suggest most small businesses start with.

One catch: no-answer forwarding usually only applies when your phone is on and has signal. If you switch your mobile off at night, or it's out of coverage, also set the "unreachable" or "switched off" divert (on BT Business mobiles that's *62), or calls may go to voicemail instead.

The other trade-off: every caller hears your phone ring a few times before the AI answers, so they wait a little longer than they would if the AI answered straight away. Some carriers let you choose how long the line rings before forwarding.

Pattern 2: switch forwarding on when you close

Use unconditional forwarding ("forward all calls") and turn it on when you lock up and off when you open. On most mobile and landline services that's one short code each way. Out of hours, callers reach the AI straight away. During the day, your phone works as normal and the AI isn't involved.

This suits businesses that want the AI kept strictly to closed hours, such as a practice whose reception team prefers to take every daytime call. The risk is human: someone forgets to switch it on, and the evening's calls go to voicemail. If your business phone system has a time-of-day schedule, use it to switch the forwarding automatically and the risk goes away.

Pattern 3: let it answer everything, 24 hours a day

Forward all calls to Klugon all the time, and the AI becomes your front desk around the clock. Your team picks up leads and messages from the dashboard.

This is the simplest to set up and the most consistent for callers. It also uses the most voice minutes, because daytime calls count too, so check the worked example below against your call volumes before choosing it.

Forwarding codes from the carriers' own pages

Forwarding is set on your phone line, so the codes come from your carrier. These are published by the carriers themselves. Check the linked page before you set anything up, because codes vary by plan and line type.

Verizon (US wireless). According to Verizon's call forwarding guide, dial *71 and the number to forward only when you're busy or don't answer (after three or four rings), *72 and the number to forward all calls, and *73 to turn either off. That makes Verizon one of the easier carriers for both Pattern 1 and Pattern 2.

AT&T home phone (US landline). AT&T's home phone call forwarding page lists *72 or 72# to forward all calls and *73 or 73# to stop. Forwarding on no answer or busy has no code; AT&T asks you to call its support line to set it up.

BT landline (UK). BT's Call Diversion guide gives 21 plus the number and # to divert all calls, 61 for calls not answered within 15 seconds, and 67 for calls when the line is engaged. Cancel each with #21#, #61# or #67#. BT notes that diverted calls are charged, unless your plan includes calls to the number you divert to.

BT Business mobile (UK). BT Business's call divert guide uses *21 for all calls, *61 for unanswered calls and *67 for when you're on another call, each followed by the number with +44 in place of the first 0 and then #. ##002# cancels every divert.

For Pattern 2, it's worth saving the "on" and "off" codes as two contacts in your phone, named "Night mode on" and "Night mode off". Then closing up is one tap. Whatever you set, ring your business number from another phone afterwards to check it reaches the AI. Our post on keeping your number with call forwarding covers the snags people hit most often, including forwarding that silently doesn't apply.

What callers need at 11pm, and what the AI does

Out-of-hours calls aren't a random sample of daytime calls. They tend to come from people who couldn't call during working hours, which means more bookings and enquiries and, for some trades, the occasional crisis. Here's how the common types play out.

The last row needs its own section.

What waits for the morning: the handover

When a call needs a person, Klugon hands the conversation to your team. Out of hours, that has a very specific meaning, and it's worth being clear before you rely on it.

The AI takes the caller's name, number and the reason for the call, saves it as a lead, and tells the caller someone will get back to them. That's the whole handover. It doesn't wake anyone up. It can't transfer the call to an on-call phone, it doesn't send you a text, and it doesn't email you. If you're on the Business plan or above and have connected Slack or Zapier, the new lead is posted there as soon as it's created, so anyone watching that channel sees it. Otherwise the lead waits in your dashboard until somebody opens it.

For most after-hours calls that's exactly right. A quote request at 10pm doesn't need an answer before 8am; it needs a complete message and a prompt callback. Where it isn't enough is anything that genuinely can't wait.

If you offer an emergency service

Plumbers, locksmiths, heating engineers, vets and property managers all get calls at night that can't wait for the morning. Klugon can't decide on its own that a call is urgent and get you out of bed. So if you run an emergency service, you need a separate route for it, and the AI's job is to point people to it clearly.

The simplest way: put an emergency instruction in your knowledge base, with the number to call. For example: "If the caller has an emergency such as a flood, no heating for a vulnerable person or being locked out, give them our emergency line, 07700 900456, and ask them to call it now. Then take their details." The AI can read that number out on the call. The caller dials it, and your on-call person answers. Mention the emergency line in your greeting too, so urgent callers hear it before anything else.

That keeps the AI on the work it's good at (bookings, questions and messages) while urgent calls reach a person on a number you control. Our pages for trades businesses and clinics go into the details that matter for each.

When someone's life or safety is at risk

No answering service, human or AI, is a substitute for the emergency services. If your business is one where callers might describe a medical emergency, a gas leak or a fire, your greeting and your knowledge base should say plainly that they need to hang up and call 999 in the UK or 911 in the US. Don't let the AI assess symptoms or tell anyone whether something is safe. It shouldn't be making those judgements at any hour, and at night there's nobody to check its work.

The morning routine

The value of overnight cover depends on what happens at 8am. Here's a routine that takes ten to fifteen minutes on a normal day:

1. Open the leads list and sort by newest. Every "please call me" from overnight is there with a name, number and notes.
2. Check the insights to-do list. It shows conversations waiting for a person, leads not contacted after two days and bookings awaiting confirmation.
3. Look at new bookings for today and tomorrow, so nobody's surprised when a customer walks in.
4. Skim the overnight calls in the inbox. Filter by the phone channel. You're looking for calls that ended without a booking or a lead, which can mean the AI didn't have an answer.
5. Call people back in order of urgency, then mark each lead as contacted so the list stays honest.
6. Fix one gap. If a caller asked something the AI couldn't answer, add the answer to the knowledge base now.

If you're on the Business plan, a Slack channel for overnight leads means the first person in sees them on their phone before they've taken their coat off. With Zapier, you can send each new lead on to whatever tool your team already uses for callbacks.

A sample after-hours call

Northgate Motors is an imaginary two-bay independent garage, open weekdays from 8am to 6pm. It's on the Starter plan, with its own number forwarded to Klugon on no answer. Its knowledge base includes its prices, its courtesy-car policy, and an instruction: "If a warning light is red or the car feels unsafe, tell the caller we advise them not to drive it and to contact their breakdown cover. Never say whether a car is safe to drive." The call comes in at 9:40pm on a Thursday.

AI: Thanks for calling Northgate Motors. You're speaking to our AI assistant. The team can't get to the phone right now, but I can book you in, answer questions or take a message. How can I help?

Caller: Hi, my engine warning light came on on the way home. Orange, I think. Is it safe to drive tomorrow?

AI: I can't tell you whether the car is safe to drive, I'm afraid. That needs a mechanic to look at it. If the light turns red or the car feels wrong, the garage's advice is not to drive it and to call your breakdown cover. I can book you in for a diagnostic check. Would that help?

Caller: Yes please. As early as possible.

AI: A diagnostic check is 65 pounds and takes about an hour. The earliest slot is tomorrow at 8:30.

Caller: I'll take it. Can I have a courtesy car while it's in?

AI: The garage has one courtesy car, and it's arranged by the team directly. I can ask them to call you about it first thing. What's your name and the best number?

Caller: Sam Okoro, 07700 900987.

AI: And the car's registration?

Caller: It's a blue Golf, AB12 CDE.

AI: Thanks, Sam. You're booked for a diagnostic check tomorrow at 8:30. Your reference is N-1173. I've also left a note asking the team to call you about the courtesy car.

Caller: Will you text me if it's something serious?

AI: I can't send texts, but the team will call you once they've looked at the car.

Caller: Okay. Thanks.

AI: You're welcome. See you at 8:30.

The next morning at Northgate

The owner opens the dashboard at 7:45. The booking for 8:30 is in the calendar with Sam's name and number. There's a new lead: courtesy car request, blue Golf, AB12 CDE. The call is in the inbox, marked as a phone call, with its duration.

There's no Slack message, because Northgate is on Starter, and no email, because Klugon doesn't send them. That's why the owner checks at 7:45 every weekday. The courtesy car gets sorted with one phone call before Sam arrives.

Look at what the AI declined to do. It didn't tell Sam the car was fine, because nobody had looked at it. It didn't promise a text. It didn't pretend to book the courtesy car, because the garage's policy is that a person arranges it. Each of those is a line in the knowledge base doing its job.

Setting up after-hours cover

The order matters, because you can't connect a real phone line until the 7-day trial has ended. A card is needed to start the trial; you're charged when it ends unless you cancel, and cancelling during the trial costs nothing. The trial is the week to get the AI right in the browser.

1. Start the voice trial and create your assistant.
2. Write your after-hours knowledge. Start with the questions people ask out of hours, which are often different from daytime ones: are you open tomorrow, can I book, what happens if I'm late, how do I get there.
3. Write the emergency instruction, if your business has emergencies, with the number to call. Add the life-safety line too.
4. Write your "take a message" list: complaints, quotes for unusual jobs, anything needing a professional judgement. Tell the AI to take details for those, not answer them.
5. Set your booking rules: opening hours, timezone, service lengths, staff, buffers, minimum notice and closed dates. Minimum notice matters most at night; an hour is the default.
6. Write a greeting for out of hours. Say who's answering, that the business is closed and what the AI can do. Unless you use Pattern 2, avoid saying "we're closed", because the same greeting also plays on daytime calls. "The team can't get to the phone right now" works at any hour.
7. Test it in the browser at least ten times. Ask awkward questions, ask for a person, and say "it's an emergency".
8. After the trial, get a Klugon number or set up forwarding to one ($9 a month).
9. Choose a routing pattern from the three above and set it up with your carrier's codes.
10. Call your number from another phone, both during the day and after closing, to check where it goes.
11. Connect Slack or Zapier if you're on Business or above, or agree who checks the dashboard first thing.
12. Read every overnight call for the first two weeks and fill gaps as you find them.

If you haven't yet written down what your business does with out-of-hours calls, our post on an after-hours call handling policy gives you a template to start from.

What after-hours cover costs with Klugon

Out-of-hours answering runs on the same AI voice agent plans as daytime calls. Prices are in US dollars; the pricing page has the full detail.

Add $9 a month for each phone number. Minutes over your allowance cost $15 per started 100 minutes. The Business plan adds Slack and Zapier notifications, which are the closest thing Klugon has to a real-time alert for overnight leads, plus calendar connections such as Google Calendar and Outlook. The plan comparison lists everything each tier includes.

Worked example: covering evenings and weekends

Every assumption below is stated, so you can redo the sums with your own figures.

The hours you're actually closed

Take a business open Monday to Friday, 8am to 6pm.

• Weekday evenings and nights, 6pm to 8am: 14 hours × 5 = 70 hours.
• Weekends: 48 hours.
• Total out-of-hours: 118 hours a week, out of 168. You're closed for about 70% of the week.

That's the gap. A lot of businesses accept it as normal because covering it with people is so expensive.

Covering those hours with staff

Using the US Bureau of Labor Statistics median pay for receptionists, $18.27 an hour in May 2025, 118 hours a week costs about $2,156 a week, or roughly $9,340 a month, in wages alone. No single person can work 118 hours, so you'd need several people on a rota; and under the federal overtime rules, anyone who works more than 40 hours in a week must be paid at least time and a half for the extra hours.

In the UK, the National Living Wage for workers aged 21 and over is £12.71 an hour from April 2026. 118 hours a week at that rate is about £1,500 a week, roughly £6,500 a month, before employer costs and any premium for nights and weekends.

Paying people to sit by a phone overnight rarely makes sense for a small business, which is why most don't. The real alternatives are voicemail, a staffed answering service paid per call or per minute, or an AI.

Covering them with Klugon

• Assumption: you get 6 calls each weekday evening and night, and 10 calls each weekend day. That's 30 + 20 = 50 out-of-hours calls a week, about 215 a month.
• Assumption: the average call lasts 3½ minutes.
• That's about 750 minutes a month, within Starter's 1,000.
• Cost: $99 plus $9 for the number, so $108 a month, or $88 a month billed yearly.

Now say you choose Pattern 3 and forward every call, day and night. Add 15 daytime calls each weekday at 3 minutes: that's another 975 minutes a month or so, taking you to about 1,725. On Starter, that's 725 minutes over, or eight started blocks of 100 at $15 each: $120 extra, so $228 a month including the number. Still less than Business, which becomes the cheaper plan at around 2,300 minutes a month. If you want Slack or Zapier alerts for overnight leads, though, you'll need Business whatever your minutes.

What the out-of-hours calls are worth

• Assumption: of those 215 out-of-hours calls a month, 1 in 5 is someone who wants to book, so 43.
• Assumption: today, without any cover, half of them try again during the day and half go elsewhere. That's about 21 lost bookings a month.
• Assumption: an average booking is worth $60.
• That's about $1,260 a month going elsewhere.

If the AI books even a quarter of those lost callers, around five bookings, it's already paid for Starter twice over. If your out-of-hours calls are mostly people asking whether you're open, the value is lower and comes from saving your evenings, not from bookings. Both are real, but be honest about which one you're buying. Our guide on what missed calls cost has a fuller way to work this out.

Measuring whether out-of-hours cover is paying off

Give it four weeks before deciding. The analytics page shows the numbers that answer the question:

• Busiest hours and weekdays. This is the most useful chart for after-hours cover. It shows how many conversations land at each hour of the day. If a solid share arrive after closing, your out-of-hours cover is doing real work.
• Phone calls and minutes talked, compared with the previous period, which tells you whether you're on the right plan.
• Bookings and leads, compared with the period before you switched it on.
• The share handled without a person, which tells you how many calls needed your team.

The insights page adds questions without a good answer, which at night are often things your website doesn't say either: late arrival rules, parking after 6pm, whether you open on bank holidays.

A simple test you can do yourself: before switching on cover, count how many voicemails and missed calls you return in a typical week. A month after, compare that with the overnight bookings and leads in the dashboard. That's your before and after.

Limits of an AI after-hours service

Out of hours, nobody is there to catch a mistake until the morning, so the limits matter more than they do in the day. Klugon's are:

• No live transfer and no on-call alerts. It can't connect callers to anyone or wake anyone up. Give urgent callers a separate number to dial.
• No texts, emails or reminders to callers. Booking references are given on the call.
• No email or push alerts to you. Slack and Zapier on Business and above; otherwise the dashboard.
• No schedule inside Klugon. It answers whatever is forwarded to it. Hours are controlled by your phone forwarding.
• No call recordings, and call logs may be partial. Every call is in your inbox, but don't expect a complete word-for-word record of both sides.
• No rescheduling on calls. It can book and cancel.
• No payments on calls.
• No phone number during the 7-day trial. Test in the browser first.
• No number porting. Forward your existing number, or connect a SIP trunk on Business and above.
• It says it's an AI only if your greeting does. Write one that does.
• It answers from what you give it. If your out-of-hours policies aren't in the knowledge base, it can't follow them.

AI or a staffed 24 hour answering service for a small business

Staffed answering services have been covering small businesses out of hours for decades, and for some they're still the right choice. A trained person can judge an urgent call, calm someone down and some services can patch the call through to an on-call number. If your nights are mostly genuine emergencies, a human service is the better fit, and the AI's honest limits above are the reason.

If your nights are mostly bookings, questions and "please call me back", an AI is usually the better fit. It books straight into your calendar rather than taking a message about a booking, it costs a monthly plan rather than a fee per call, and every conversation ends up in one inbox. Some businesses use both: the AI handles routine overnight calls and gives urgent callers the number of their staffed emergency line. We go through the differences in AI answering service versus a call centre, and in how to never miss a customer call we look at every option, including the ones that aren't Klugon.

Frequently asked questions

Does Klugon answer calls 24 hours a day?

Yes. It answers any call that reaches your Klugon number, at any hour, including weekends and bank holidays, as long as your voice plan is active. Which calls reach it is decided by your phone line's forwarding.

Can I set it to answer only when we're closed?

Not inside Klugon. There's no business-hours switch. Use your phone provider's forwarding instead: forward only unanswered calls, which covers closed hours automatically, or turn all-call forwarding on at closing time and off when you open.

Can it put an urgent caller through to me?

No. Klugon can't transfer calls or ring an on-call phone. For emergencies, add your emergency number to the knowledge base and greeting so the AI can give it to callers, and they dial it themselves.

How will I know about calls that came in overnight?

Every call appears in your inbox, and bookings and leads appear in your dashboard. On the Business plan and above, new leads and bookings are also posted to Slack or Zapier. Klugon doesn't send email or push alerts, so on Starter you check the dashboard.

Will callers get a text confirming their booking?

No. Klugon doesn't send texts, emails or reminders. The AI gives the caller a booking reference during the call, and your team can contact them if needed.

Can I keep my existing business number?

Yes. Klugon gets you a dedicated number for $9 a month and you forward your existing number to it with your carrier's forwarding codes. Klugon doesn't port numbers, so yours stays with your current provider.

Can I try it before I forward real calls?

Yes. The 7-day trial lets you build and test the assistant in the browser. A card is needed to start, and you're charged when the trial ends unless you cancel. Phone numbers become available once the trial has ended.

Will an AI answering service mean I never miss a call?

It means calls that reach it are answered, at any hour. It doesn't change what happens to calls your forwarding doesn't send to it, and it can't replace you on calls that need a person. Those become messages for your team.

If your evenings currently belong to the work phone, the quickest way to judge this is to build an assistant for your own business and call it. You can start a trial from the sign-up page, or see the rest of Klugon's AI receptionist first, including chat and messaging for the same out-of-hours questions.