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Developers/Tutorials/After-hours call routing

Route after-hours calls to voicemail

Send phone calls to voicemail outside business hours, with a branded greeting and automatic transcription. The voicemail lands in the inbox as a conversation with channel call, ready for an agent to follow up.

1. Set phone business hours

Open Settings → Availability → Business hours. Set the phone schedule per day. Outside this window, the routing rule from step 2 fires.

2. Configure voicemail on the DID

  1. Open Settings → Phones → Numbers.
  2. Pick the DID.
  3. Under After-hours behaviour, select Voicemail.
  4. Optionally set a Pre-voicemail wait (ring agents for 30s first, then voicemail) for graceful fallback.

3. Record or generate a greeting

Two options:

  • Upload an MP3. Pre-recorded by a human, drop into the dashboard.
  • Generate from a script. If you have a cloned brand voice, type a script, and we synthesise.

Keep it short: 15 to 20 seconds. Identify the business, mention the after-hours status, set the expectation for callback.

If you do not upload a greeting, we use a default text-to-speech read of your workspace name.

4. Configure the voicemail follow-up

When a voicemail lands, message.com creates a conversation with channel: call and a voicemail_left event. Decide what happens next:

  • Auto-route to a department. Voicemails go to whichever department owns the DID.
  • Auto-reply with SMS. If the caller's number is mobile, send an SMS confirmation that we received their voicemail and will call back.
  • Tag for triage. Auto-tag voicemails so they sort to the top of the queue when agents come online.

5. Test

  1. Temporarily shift business hours so the current time falls outside.
  2. Call the DID from your own phone.
  3. Hear the greeting, leave a 20-second message.
  4. Open app.message.com. A conversation appears with the voicemail audio, the transcription, the caller's phone number, and the timestamp.
  5. Restore normal hours.

Common pitfalls

  • Voicemail full. We do not cap voicemail count. There is no "mailbox full" case.
  • Transcription accuracy. Heavy accents, background noise, or hold music in the recording reduce accuracy. Our transcription pipeline is high accuracy but not perfect.
  • Robocalls. Carrier-side STIR/SHAKEN flagging plus our spam heuristics drop most robocalls before voicemail. See Robocall mitigation.
  • Greeting cuts off. Some carriers stop the call after 60 seconds of greeting plus dead air. Keep greetings under 30 seconds.

Next steps