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After-hours answering service for Canadian businesses
Your phone stops being answered at 5pm. Your customers do not stop having problems at 5pm, and the urgent ones call someone else.
Context
What after hours actually costs
Trades, clinics, property managers, and service businesses all share the same shape: a meaningful share of the calls that matter most arrive outside business hours. A burst pipe at 11pm, a tenant locked out, a client whose system is down before a Monday deadline.
Voicemail loses most of those. Callers with an urgent problem work down a list, and the first company that answers gets the job. You never see the ones you lost, which is why this is so easy to under-count.
The exercise worth doing is simple: pull the after-hours missed-call count from your phone system for one month, and multiply by your average job value and a realistic conversion rate. Most owners are surprised, and the number is usually several times the cost of coverage.
Scope
What is included
- Evenings, overnight, weekends, and statutory holidays
- Emergency dispatch to your on-call person, by criteria you define
- AI-first capture with human escalation on anything urgent or unusual
- Messages delivered by SMS or email, immediately or next morning
- Your greeting, your questions, your escalation thresholds
- A monthly record of who called, when, and what for
Detail
Getting the dispatch rules right
The setup conversation that matters is the one about what constitutes an emergency. Most businesses have never written it down, which is why on-call people get woken for things that could have waited and not woken for things that could not.
We write the criteria with you, in your language: what gets dispatched immediately, what gets a callback first thing, and what simply waits. You can change it any time, and it is worth changing after the first month once you can see the real pattern of what comes in.
Delivery
Canada or Global
Both delivery tiers are available on after-hours coverage. Either can work here, and the deciding factor is usually what the calls contain rather than when they arrive: a clinic taking patient details after hours is a different question from a restaurant taking bookings. We will walk through your call mix and say which one applies.
FAQ
Questions people ask
How much does after-hours answering cost?
A monthly base plus a rate per call, so a quiet month costs less than a busy one. On the Global tier that is $89 a month and $2.50 per support call; on Canada, $199 and $5.75. Setup runs $1,500 to $2,500 depending on how complicated your dispatch rules are. All of it is on the pricing page.
How fast does an emergency reach us?
Immediately, by the method you choose — phone, SMS, or both — as soon as the call meets your dispatch criteria. Non-emergencies are held and delivered as a summary, which is the part that protects your on-call person from being woken by a billing question.
Do you cover statutory holidays?
Yes. Evenings, overnight, weekends, and statutory holidays are all included in the plan rather than surcharged. Holidays are precisely when your competitors are not answering.
What if we get a sudden spike in calls?
Calls are billed at your per-call rate rather than against an allowance that runs out, so a busy month costs more and your phone still gets answered. Above roughly 1,500 calls a month we scope it properly instead of letting a per-call rate run away with your bill.
Related
Next step
Find out what this would look like for you
A 20-minute call. We ask what breaks, what it costs you, and who handles it now. If we are not the right fit we will say so.