The two gaps it closes
After hours
When you’re closed, the agent still answers — books what it can, takes a message for the rest, and tells the caller when you reopen.
Overflow
When your team is on other calls, it answers in parallel instead of sending callers to voicemail. No busy signal, no queue.
It knows when you’re open
Each agent carries your business hours — a timezone, a weekly open/closed grid, and one-off holidays. The agent is live-aware of whether you’re open or closed and changes its behavior accordingly, so a closed Sunday and a busy Tuesday afternoon are handled differently and correctly.What happens while you’re closed
By default the agent keeps full functionality after hours — it can still answer questions, book, and capture requests. You decide what changes:- Take a message — capture the caller’s details and email them to your team for the morning.
- Route urgent calls — let self-declared emergencies (no heat, a leak, an outage) go to an on-call number, even when ordinary transfers are off.
- Hand off to a person — turn on after-hours transfer to a specific number when someone is genuinely on call.
In the API
Business hours and after-hours behavior live on the agent. You set them with a normal agent update, then publish.| Action | Endpoint | Scope |
|---|---|---|
| Set business hours & after-hours behavior | PATCH /agents/{id} | agents:write |
| Add a take-a-message skill | POST /agents/{id}/skills | skills:write |
| Publish the change | POST /agents/{id}/publish | agents:write |
| Review what you caught | GET /agents/{id}/calls | calls:read |
Editing changes the draft; phone and chat serve the last published version. Publish after you adjust hours, or the live agent keeps the old schedule.