After Hours Action: routing calls outside business hours

Your business hours tell VICIdial when you are open. The After Hours Action tells it what to do with the calls that arrive when you are not. Without it set thoughtfully, a customer calling at midnight might hear endless ringing or a dead line, which is a bad first impression. With it set right, they hear something useful and you do not lose them.

How the line knows it is closed

This setting works hand in hand with the Call Time scheme on the Ingroup. VICIdial checks the incoming call against the hours in that scheme. If the call lands inside open hours, it flows to agents as normal. If it lands outside them, the call is treated as After hours and sent straight to whatever you chose for the After Hours Action.

If your Call Time is still the default 24hours, this never triggers, because the line is technically never closed. Set real hours first; the piece on the Call Time setting covers that.

Your six routing choices

The After Hours Action gives you a handful of ways to handle a closed-hours call:

• MESSAGE: plays an audio file, then hangs up. This is the default, using a file called vm-goodbye unless you change it.
• VOICEMAIL: sends the caller to a voicemail box so they can leave a message. There is also a no-instructions variant that skips the recorded prompts after the greeting.
• HANGUP: ends the call immediately, with no message. Blunt, but sometimes that is what you want.
• EXTENSION: routes the call to a dialplan extension, for example an emergency line or an external number.
• IN_GROUP: hands the call to another Ingroup, such as a 24-hour overflow team or a different region's queue.
• CALLMENU: sends the call into an IVR (interactive voice response) menu, so the caller can pick options like leaving a message or hearing your hours.

Picking the right one

For most lines, VOICEMAIL or a friendly MESSAGE that states your hours is the kind choice; callers know what happened and what to do next. If you run a follow-the-sun setup, IN_GROUP to your overnight team keeps the line live. Whatever you choose, record your own audio rather than leaving the stock vm-goodbye file. Each action reveals an extra field for the matching destination once you select it: choose EXTENSION and you get a field for the extension, choose VOICEMAIL and you get a field for the mailbox, and so on.

A good after-hours message does three small things: it tells the caller you are closed, states when you open, and gives them one clear action, whether that is leaving a message or calling back. Vague is worse than blunt here. And if you send after-hours calls into a Call menu, keep that menu short, because a tired caller at 11pm has little patience for a long list of options.

After Hours Action is one of several routing safety nets on an in-group, alongside drop actions and the no-agent action. To see how they fit together, read the inbound call handling guide. A managed VICIdial box with sensible after-hours routing out of the box is on our pricing page.