Real boundaries. Real coverage.
When the business closes, the phone behaves the way you tell it to. Working-hours rules, holiday overrides, after-hours voicemail with email transcripts, optional on-call rotations or paging-service forwards. Solo gets the basics; Team adds rotation hunt groups and shared voicemail. Configure once, runs unattended.
What this is solving for.
After-hours phone coverage is the operational problem every working business has but rarely solves cleanly. Customers call outside hours; somebody needs to triage. The bad versions: ignore them entirely (lose business), forward everything to a personal cell (no boundary), pay an answering service for every call (expensive and unnecessary for routine messages), or set generic voicemail (works but loses urgency on real emergencies).
The good version is layered. Most after-hours calls are routine — a customer asking for pricing, a patient confirming an appointment, a vendor with a non-urgent question. These should land in voicemail with transcripts, triaged the next morning. A small percentage are urgent — true emergencies, time-sensitive service issues. These should reach a real person via a paging service or on-call rotation. The phone system should know the difference automatically based on routing rules.
Kelir handles all of this with the standard UCaaS routing primitives: working hours apply, after-hours greeting plays, the call routes to the right destination based on its source. Set it up once; it runs every night and weekend without intervention.
Features that apply.
Working hours and the routing chain together cover every after-hours scenario. The same call handling depth as RingCentral or Dialpad, on every Kelir plan including Solo.
Working hours
Per-day schedules + holiday overrides — the foundation of every after-hours rule.
Auto-attendant
After-hours greeting that explains coverage and sets expectations.
Voicemail transcripts
Triage messages by reading the transcript on your lock screen tomorrow morning.
Hunt groups
On-call rotation routing on Team plans — sequential cascade through covering staff.
Call forwarding
Forward to an answering service or paging-service number for true emergencies.
Shared voicemail
Team inbox for after-hours messages on Team plans — triage in the morning together.
Step by step.
- Step 01
Define working hours
Set per-day schedules in the Kelir mobile app or admin portal: Mon–Fri 9–6, Sat 10–2, Sun closed. Apply company-wide or per-department.
- Step 02
Mark the year's holidays
In the working-hours config, mark holidays for the year. Each holiday gets its own greeting and routing behavior.
- Step 03
Compose the after-hours greeting
Auto-attendant after-hours greeting: "Office is closed — leave a message with your name and number, we'll call back during business hours. For emergencies, press 1."
- Step 04
Configure the routine path
Default after-hours behavior: route to voicemail. Solo: personal voicemail. Team: department-shared voicemail with transcripts to the team inbox.
- Step 05
Configure the urgent path
Add an emergency option ("press 1") that forwards to a paging-service number, an on-call rotation hunt group (Team), or a covering provider's personal cell.
- Step 06
Set up the on-call rotation (Team plans)
Create a sequential hunt group with on-call providers in order. Update the order weekly from app.kelir.io. Catcher voicemail handles missed cascades.
- Step 07
Test the configuration
Call the line outside hours. Verify the after-hours greeting plays, the routine path goes to voicemail with transcript, the urgent path reaches the right destination.
What changes.
- Routine after-hours calls land in voicemail with transcripts ready for morning triage.
- Urgent calls reach a real person via paging service or on-call rotation, automatically.
- Holiday weeks run unattended — set it in October, ignore it the rest of the year.
- Customers hear a professional after-hours greeting with clear expectations, not a generic voicemail beep.
- Personal cell phones stay personal — no business calls bleeding into family time.
- On-call rotation handovers happen via the admin portal, not by ad-hoc "my turn this week" arrangements.
The right buyer.
Service businesses with after-hours expectations — clinics with on-call rotations, contractors with emergency dispatch, agencies that need an emergency line for major clients, solo professionals who want a real evening boundary. Anyone whose customers might call outside hours and expect some level of coverage beyond "leave a message".
Who this isn't for: If your business has zero after-hours coverage by design (and customers know it), the basic Kelir voicemail covers it without configuration. If you operate 24/7 with full agent coverage every hour, you don't need after-hours routing — you need shift scheduling, which is closer to a contact-center workflow.
Common questions
On-call rotation routes calls across multiple covering staff — that requires multiple seats. Solo's after-hours coverage is single-user: voicemail with transcripts, optional forward to a personal cell or paging service. The full rotation feature activates on Team Starter ($29.99/seat) with hunt groups.
Yes. Per-day schedules support different after-hours routing per day of week — Saturday afternoon might forward to a weekend-coverage rotation while Sunday goes straight to voicemail. Configurable in the working-hours UI.
The holiday greeting plays, the holiday-specific routing applies (typically: route everything to a holiday voicemail with promised next-business-day callback). Configure each holiday independently if needed (Thanksgiving Wednesday afternoon early-close vs Christmas Day fully closed).
Yes. After-hours behavior can be "forward to external number" — point it at an answering service that takes messages and pages out for true emergencies. Common pattern for high-stakes practices that don't want pure voicemail.
Every voicemail arrives by email with both the audio and a text transcript. Lock-screen email previews show the transcript text — "Hi, calling about a leak at my house" reads in 2 seconds. Triage 30 messages in 5 minutes; call back the urgent ones first.
Yes. The Kelir routing platform evaluates the schedule before ringing the eSIM. Outside working hours, inbound calls don't ring through to your line — they route directly to whatever you configured (voicemail, forward, etc.). Real silence on personal time.
Related use cases & features.
Inbound call routing
The full inbound routing chain that after-hours rules layer onto.
Working hours boundary (Solo)
Solo professional version of the after-hours problem.
Working hours feature
Detailed feature page for the schedules + holiday calendar.