Question handling
What the assistant should do when nobody is there
A large share of the messages any business receives arrive when the business is shut, which is most of the reason an assistant is on the site at all. The evening and weekend volume is real and mostly ordinary, but a small part of it is urgent, and the whole design of this intent is about separating those two quickly and setting an expectation you can meet in the morning.
What they are really asking
Is anybody going to read this, when, and is there something faster if I cannot wait.
- are you open now
- is anyone there
- i need help urgently
- when will someone reply
- can someone call me tomorrow
- whats your emergency number
- i have a problem and youre closed
- do you have a 24 hour line
- will you see this tonight
- who do i call at the weekend
The material that answers it
An assistant is only as good as the document behind it, and for this question the document usually exists but is written in the wrong shape. What each one has to contain to be answerable:
| Your emergency route, and what qualifies for it | The number, who answers, and a plain description of what it is for. Just as important is what it is not for, because an emergency line that everyone uses stops being one. Write both halves. |
|---|---|
| When somebody actually replies | Your real response time out of hours, in the terms you can meet: next working day, within the morning, Monday for anything arriving over a weekend. A range you hit beats a promise you miss. |
| Everything that works while you are closed | Online ordering, a booking page, self service account areas, published guides, a knowledge page that answers the common problem. Closed does not mean nothing can happen, and pointing at what still works is often the whole answer. |
| Your closed periods, including the unusual ones | Weekends, holidays, an annual shutdown, hours that differ by department. Somebody messaging on the first day of a two week closure needs to know that, not a generic next working day. |
| Where the messages land | Which address receives the contact form, who monitors it and how often. If nobody reads that inbox before Tuesday, the wording has to say Tuesday. |
How to handle it
Decide what out of hours means for your business first
For a plumber it means an emergency line and a genuine callout. For a software business it usually means the next working day and nothing else. For a restaurant it means the booking page is still open and nobody is answering the phone.
Those need different wording, and using the generic version produces the wrong impression in two of the three cases. Write the material for what you actually do overnight.
Route anything urgent before anything else
If you have an emergency route, it belongs in the fallback message itself rather than left to be composed, so it appears immediately regardless of how the question was phrased. Somebody in trouble types before they read.
Describe what qualifies in the same message. Being specific about what the line is for protects it from being used for everything, which is what makes it useless when it is actually needed.
Offer the message form and say where it goes
When somebody asks for a person the assistant offers a form collecting a name, an email and a message, which is emailed to the address you nominate. Out of hours that is the whole handover, so the wording around it matters more than usual.
Prompt for the detail that makes the morning reply useful: what it is about, any reference, and a phone number if you call people back. A message that arrives complete gets answered once.
Give a wait time you can actually hit
The temptation is to say somebody will be in touch shortly, because it sounds attentive. It is the single most damaging sentence in this intent, because shortly means within the hour to the person reading it at eleven at night.
Say the real thing: nobody is here until the morning, messages left now are answered from nine, and here is what to do if that is too late. People are markedly tolerant of an honest wait and markedly intolerant of a missed promise.
When it stops being an answer
Anything that is or might be an emergency
Water coming through a ceiling, an outage affecting a business, a health concern, somebody locked out, an animal in distress. The assistant should not attempt to judge severity, and the correct behaviour is to surface the emergency route immediately and stop.
Where you have no emergency route, say that plainly and name the external service if there is one. An honest nobody is available until morning is better than a form that implies somebody is watching.
Anything with a deadline before you reopen
A booking for tomorrow morning, a delivery that must be stopped, a payment that fails tonight. The assistant should capture it with the deadline stated at the top of the message, so whoever opens the inbox sees the time pressure first.
Distress of any kind
Somebody upset, frightened or angry at midnight is not going to be helped by a process explanation. Keep the reply short, warm and ending in a route rather than an apology, and get the message captured so a person picks it up first thing.
How this one goes wrong
The reply by morning that was not
Somebody messages at nine on a Friday evening, is told the team will get back to them as soon as possible, and hears nothing until Monday afternoon. Nothing was technically promised, and the customer is furious anyway, because as soon as possible set an expectation and the weekend broke it.
The whole failure sits in one sentence of copy. An assistant that had said messages left over the weekend are answered on Monday morning would have produced a customer who waited calmly and a business that beat its own commitment. Out of hours is the one intent where under-promising is the entire technique.
The same question, trade by trade
The pattern above holds everywhere. The wording, the escalation line and the material behind it do not, so there is a page per trade.
- For a dental clinicA Friday night message about a broken tooth is not asking when you open. What the assistant has to surface before anything else.
- For a medical practiceBank holiday prescriptions, hub appointments held at another surgery and the closed route. What to publish for the hours you are shut.
- For a veterinary clinicWho covers a vet practice at night, where they are and what it costs. The answer has to arrive in the first reply.
- For a physiotherapy clinicPain after a session arriving out of hours is clinical, and physiotherapy has no emergency service to hand it to.
- For a pharmacyWhen the shutters are down the useful answer is where else is open, not what somebody should take instead.
- For a law firmOut of hours here is rarely about opening times. It is an arrest, an injunction or a hearing in the morning, and a form is not enough.
- For a accounting firmNothing can be taken on overnight and pretending otherwise costs more than saying so. What to publish for the late panic enquiry.
- For a estate agencyEnquiries land long after the branch has locked up. What an overnight reply can honestly promise about Monday, and what cannot wait for it.
- For a restaurantThe phone goes unanswered mid service and again on the dark day. What is safe to answer at midnight, and what has to wait for a person.
- For a hotelWhether the desk is manned all night, whether the door locks at eleven, and what a guest can get at three when the kitchen shut at ten.
- For a holiday rentalThe owner has a day job and lives elsewhere. Arriving at eleven at night, a boiler on a Sunday, and an honest answer about when a reply comes.
- For a gymOvernight the door still works and the desk is empty. What has to come first in the reply, and what must never be reassured about.
- For a salon or spaMany salons close two days running, so an honest wait is Tuesday. A scalp reacting tonight needs a number, not a message form.
- For a private schoolBoarding duty, the staff member on late cover and an empty office are three different evenings. A welfare message goes to a person at once.
- For a driving schoolA driving school is unreachable during the working day and busiest at night. What the assistant covers in the gap between the two.
- For a plumbing and heating firmAt eleven at night the assistant is the only thing awake. Its job is to tell a burst pipe from a bathroom enquiry in one reply.
- For a electrical contractorA dark house at midnight is often the street, the meter or the supplier rather than a fault in the building, and saying so saves a call out.
- For a removals companyKeys at four, crew still loaded at seven, nobody answering. What a website can honestly do at that hour, and what it plainly cannot.
- For a SaaS companyThe software runs all night and the team does not. What to publish about coverage windows, time zones and plan based response times.
- For a developer tools companyChange windows and incidents both happen at night. What can honestly be answered overnight, and how a severity definition decides who is woken.
- For a fintech appWhich routes run around the clock and which do not, and why a quiet weekend is settlement rather than an unanswered message.
- For a healthtech appConsultation hours, a clinician rota across time zones, and a user who has travelled. What an overnight message needs in its first line.
Questions
- Does the assistant run outside our opening hours?
- It answers whenever somebody is on your site, which is most of the reason to have it. What changes out of hours is not the answering, it is the handover: there is nobody to hand to, so the wording has to be honest about when a person picks it up.
- Can it take a message overnight?
- Yes. When somebody asks for a person it offers a form collecting a name, an email and a message, and sends it to the address you nominate. It arrives when it arrives, so tell the customer in the same breath when somebody will read it.
- Should we put our emergency number in front of everyone?
- Put it in the fallback wording with a clear description of what it is for. An emergency line that appears without qualification gets used for ordinary questions, and then the people who genuinely need it cannot get through.
- What if we have no out of hours cover at all?
- Say so. Most people are fine with a business that is closed and clear about it. The version that damages you is the one that sounds available, collects a message, and then goes quiet until Monday.
Keep reading
- Handling order statusThe most asked question in retail support and the one a document-based assistant cannot answer. What it can do instead, and where handover sits.
- Handling shipping and deliveryCut-off times, zones, timescales, public holidays and duties on international orders. The material exists on most sites, it is just buried.
- Handling returns and exchangesWindow, condition, who pays postage, exclusions. Faulty and unwanted are two different processes with two different sets of rights.
- Every question typeHandling patterns for the questions every support inbox gets.
Try it on your own material
Upload a document or point it at your site, paste one line of HTML, then ask it something only your business could answer.