An after hours answering service covers the calls that arrive when nobody is at the desk, which for most trades businesses is where the largest share of lost work happens. Evening and weekend callers have the most urgent problems and the least patience, so they move to the next company fastest.
It is also the cheapest version of the product to buy, because you are paying for a fraction of the week.
What counts as after hours?
Everything outside the hours someone reliably answers, which is usually a wider window than owners assume. If your office person leaves at four and your crew works until six, you have two uncovered hours in the middle of the working day.
Weekends and statutory holidays are the obvious part. The quiet killer is lunch, and the twenty minutes when the one person who answers the phone is on another call.
What should an after hours service do with an emergency call?
Establish whether it is genuinely an emergency, then route it by a rule you wrote, not by its own judgment. For a trades business the only two outcomes that matter are "wake someone up" and "book it for tomorrow", and the boundary between them should be yours.
This is the single most important configuration decision and most vendors will not raise it. Write the rule down before you buy anything.
How much does after hours coverage cost?
Less than full coverage, because you are buying a slice of the week, but the pricing model matters more than the hours. Live services run $100 to $1,000+ a month plus $0.75 to $1.50 a minute, and AI services $50 to $300 a month, per Nextiva's 2026 figures.
Watch the metering on emergency calls specifically. An after-hours emergency conversation is longer than a daytime enquiry, so a per-minute plan costs most exactly when you are already stressed.
| Coverage | Who it suits | Watch out for |
|---|---|---|
| Evenings and weekends only | Most residential trades | The uncovered gap at end of day |
| 24/7 | Emergency plumbing, HVAC, restoration | Per-minute billing on long night calls |
| Overflow during business hours | Shops with one office person | Assuming daytime is already covered |
| Text-back only, all hours | Small crews with no dispatcher | Callers who genuinely need to speak now |
Do I need a person available, or is automation enough?
You need a person reachable, but not a person answering. Those are different, and conflating them is what makes after-hours coverage expensive.
Automation can qualify the call, capture the details and decide whether to escalate. A human only needs to enter when the rule says wake someone up.
Is voicemail good enough after hours?
Generally no, because a caller with an emergency at 9pm is dialling the next number before your greeting finishes. Voicemail is a record that you lost the job, not a way of keeping it.
A text back within seconds performs better than voicemail for the same reason: it reaches the caller while they still have the phone in their hand. See missed call text back.
What about texting customers late at night?
CASL applies at every hour and the requirements do not relax after business hours. You still need opt-in consent, sender identification, a valid mailing address and a working unsubscribe, per the CRTC.
A reply to someone who just called you generally falls under implied consent through an existing business relationship, which is why missed-call replies are lower risk than marketing texts. Full detail: Canadian SMS compliance.
How do I know if after hours is worth it for my business?
Count after-hours calls for two weeks and multiply by your average job value and your usual close rate. If the number beats the monthly cost, the decision is made.
Most owners find the count higher than expected, because unanswered calls leave no trace anywhere except the phone bill. That is the whole problem with this category of loss.
Part of our guide to phone answering services in Canada.