# After-hours enquiries

Out of hours nothing changes about arrival: the call is answered and the mail is read on the same tick it would be at noon. What changes is what Connect may promise with nobody behind it, and what is deliberately held. The night shift is therefore an autonomy decision plus a follow-up policy, not a separate mode you switch on at six.

- **Status:** Available
- **Audience:** both
- **Channels:** phone, email
- **In the app:** #/inbox, #/calls, #/needs-you
- **Last verified:** 2026-09-10
- **Canonical:** https://connectbyjbrh.com/docs/use-cases/after-hours-enquiries/

## What actually differs after six

| Channel | Overnight | What reaches the morning |
|---|---|---|
| Phone | Answered normally; Knowledge-grounded; transcript and summary written | The summary, plus any follow-up the call created |
| Email | Fetched, triaged, drafted under the channel autonomy rule | Sent replies if autonomous; held drafts if not |
| WhatsApp | Same handling as email, inside the provider session-window rules | The conversation, continued rather than restarted |
| SMS | Inbound handled, STOP honoured; no outbound on the live carrier | The inbound message attached to the person |

The engine does not sleep, so the interesting question is not whether something is handled overnight. It is whether the reply that goes out at 02:00 is one a person would stand behind at 09:00.

## Configuring the night without a night switch

These sources do not document a working-hours toggle, and this page will not invent one. What exists is more precise anyway: autonomy resolves at four scopes — contact, endpoint, channel, workspace — and the narrowest wins. An endpoint is one mailbox or one number.

- Put the mailbox that receives out-of-hours enquiries on its own autonomy setting instead of changing the whole channel.
- Use a Standing Instruction for what Connect may say about availability, so the wording is one place rather than repeated in Knowledge.
- Give follow-ups a due time inside working hours. A commitment created at midnight that falls due at 09:15 is the correct shape of an overnight promise.
- Keep the escalation list short. Overnight is when a ranked queue earns its keep, and a queue everything escalates into is a queue nobody reads.

## What waits for the morning, and in what form

**A held draft** — A finished reply that was not sent because the autonomy rule says a person decides. The recipient sees nothing — a held draft is *no reply*, not a slow one, and the clock the customer is counting keeps running.
**A Needs You item** — A decision, an approval, or an operational problem, ranked rather than filed by arrival time. Voice line health escalates into the same queue, so a number that went unready at 23:00 is visible next to the enquiries it cost.
**A follow-up** — A dated commitment on a channel, carrying a reason. The reason is what makes it useful to whoever inherits it; a commitment without one is a line in a list.
**A refusal** — Recorded in the decision log with the rule that caused it. Overnight refusals are the cheapest way to find out what your Knowledge is missing.

## What will not work overnight

Three things fail specifically at night, and each has a workaround that is not the obvious one.

1. **A text-message confirmation.** Outbound SMS is provider-dependent and the carrier on the live account carries none, so the classic pattern of a night-time enquiry answered by a confirmation text is not available. Email or WhatsApp does the job where the contact has either.
2. **A hand-over to somebody on call.** A completed transfer to a person is foundation, not available. At 02:00 that matters more than it does at noon, because the fallback of ringing the office is not there either. A phone follow-up due at the start of the working day is the honest substitute.
3. **Working through a spent allowance.** When the daily allowance is gone, mail is held rather than dropped and the read cursor deliberately does not advance — advancing it on a refusal is how a mail agent loses messages for good. Nothing is lost, but nothing moves either until the ledger resets.

> **Careful** A phone follow-up more than 24 hours late is closed as `missed:` and never rung. A Friday-night enquiry with a Monday-morning call-back is inside that window; a Friday-night enquiry nobody looks at until Tuesday is not, and the queue will say so rather than ring somebody cold.

## What the night costs

A call at 03:00 costs exactly what the same call costs at 15:00, because the price is audio tokens rather than staffed time. The change is in variance: overnight volume is lumpier, and a single long call can consume what a quiet night was budgeted for. Every call is priced and charged, and one the remaining budget cannot cover is stopped rather than run on.

Email overnight is bounded by the allowance rather than by the clock. If most of a workspace mail arrives while nobody is watching, the allowance is the number to look at first, not the autonomy mode.

## Questions

### Does the caller get told that nobody is in the office?

Only if you have said so. Connect speaks from Knowledge and from your Standing Instructions; it does not add an out-of-hours apology by itself, and it does not know your rota unless the workspace holds that as a fact. Putting the wording in one Standing Instruction keeps it consistent across phone, email and WhatsApp.

### Will emails actually be answered at three in the morning?

That depends entirely on the channel autonomy mode. Under `autonomous` the reply goes when it is written, timestamp and all. Under `ask_before_send` it is written and held, and the recipient sees nothing until somebody approves. Under `draft_only` it is written and never queued for approval at all, which is the mode to use while you are still learning what Connect would say.

### What happens to an enquiry that arrives after the allowance is spent?

It is held, not dropped, and the read cursor stays where it is so the message is still unread rather than silently passed over. The refusal shows in Needs You with its cause. When the allowance resets the held work is picked up in order of the priority the engine reads off the thread.

## Related

- [Never miss a business call](https://connectbyjbrh.com/docs/use-cases/missed-calls/)
- [What Connect may do](https://connectbyjbrh.com/docs/autonomy/)
- [Follow-ups in Connect](https://connectbyjbrh.com/docs/follow-ups/)
- [Email in Connect](https://connectbyjbrh.com/docs/email/)
- [Running a business on your own](https://connectbyjbrh.com/docs/use-cases/solo-operator/)
- [Human approval without blocking low-risk work](https://connectbyjbrh.com/research/approval-without-blocking/)

## What this page is based on

- docs-source/sources/GENERAL.md §5 — autonomy scopes and Needs You
- docs-source/sources/CHANNELS.md §1 — the allowance and the read cursor
- docs-source/sources/GENERAL.md §7 — follow-ups and the 24-hour rule
- docs-source/sources/PHONE.md §12 — transfer and SMS