After-hours answering line
Dispatch
When your office is closed, Dispatch answers your phone, takes down what happened, and sends you a clear report. If it is an emergency, your on-call technician hears about it right away, not the next morning.
The problem
After hours, calls go to voicemail
Most landscaping, plumbing and property-service businesses send night and weekend calls to voicemail. Messages are hard to hear, often missing a callback number, and nobody listens to them until morning.
Meanwhile, a sprinkler line keeps flooding a street, or a fallen tree sits on a car, for hours, because the one call that mattered sounded like all the others.
What your caller hears
A call, step by step
The phone rings after hours
During business hours, calls ring straight through to your office as they do today. When you are closed, Dispatch picks up instead.
A greeting, and an honest notice
Your greeting first, then a plain statement that this is an automated assistant and that the call is recorded. Every caller hears it, every time.
“Thanks for calling Oak Hollow Landscaping. You’ve reached our after-hours line. I’m an automated assistant and I’ll take down your report for the on-call team. All calls are monitored and recorded.”A few short questions
Name, callback number, community, where the problem is, what is going on, how urgent it is, and the best time to call back. If the caller says it all in one breath, nothing is asked twice.
It reads everything back
The caller hears their report read back and can correct anything before it is sent.
“Let me read that back. Janet Kim, at 714 555 0177. A broken sprinkler head by the north gate at Cielo Vista… Is that right?”A polite goodbye
It sticks to what you have approved it to say, such as when to expect a call back, and then hangs up.
Your report goes out
Within a few minutes of hanging up, by email, by text message, or both, with the recording and a word-for-word transcript.
Emergencies
Emergencies don’t wait for morning
Someone could get hurt
If a caller mentions a fire, a smell of gas, a power line down or someone badly hurt, Dispatch tells them, first, to hang up and call 911 or the utility company. Safety comes before the report.
Urgent, but nobody is in danger
Water flooding that won’t shut off, a tree on a house or a car: your on-call technician gets a text message immediately, while the caller is still on the line, not at the end of the call.
You decide what counts as an emergency, in your own words, from the control panel.
The report
What lands in your inbox
Every after-hours call becomes one tidy report: who called, how to reach them, where, what happened and how urgent it is, plus the recording and the full transcript. Here is a sample, made up for this page.
Broken sprinkler — North gate entry, Cielo Vista
Where
- Location
- North gate entry, Cielo Vista
- Community / HOA
- Cielo Vista
- Address or cross streets
- not given
- Where on the property
- North gate, the sidewalk by the entry
- Confirmed by caller
- Yes, at the readback
What
- Broken sprinkler
- A broken sprinkler head by the Cielo Vista north gate is spraying water across the sidewalk.
- What they can see
- Broken sprinkler head
- Running now
- Still spraying
- How much water
- Spraying across the sidewalk, not flooding
Who
- Caller
- Janet Kim
- Callback number
- (714) 555-0177
- Existing customer
- yes
- Best time to call
- Tomorrow morning
Report
- Urgency
- normal Water is spraying but not flooding; the caller says it is not urgent.
- Call started
- Thursday, Oct 29 at 9:10 PM
- Text message
- North gate entry, Cielo Vista. Broken sprinkler head, still spraying, spraying across the sidewalk, not flooding. Call Janet Kim (714) 555-0177.
Recording
Transcript
Text message · to the on-call phone
Your control panel
You stay in charge
A simple web page, on your computer or your phone, where you can:
- set your hours and holidays, so calls ring your office when you are open;
- choose the on-call number and who gets reports, by email or text;
- write the greeting, and the few things the assistant is allowed to say;
- list the words and situations that count as emergencies;
- look back through every call, with its recording, transcript and report.
Privacy and recording
Told up front, kept only as long as you say
Every caller is told at the start that they are talking to an automated assistant and that the call is recorded. Some states, including California, require telling callers a call is recorded; Dispatch always does.
Recordings, transcripts and reports are kept for the number of days you choose, then deleted automatically. Reports go only to the people you list. Each business gets its own installation, which can run in the business’s own cloud account.