After-hours coverage is a dispatch or answering desk that picks up your calls when your own office is closed — nights, weekends, and holidays — and books or handles them in your name. Pricing usually runs from $650 a month for a small fleet on a per-minute or bundled plan, far less than staffing an overnight shift, and it pays for itself by capturing calls that would otherwise hit voicemail.
For most fleets the office closes at six and the phone keeps ringing. After-hours coverage is the answer to that gap — but "after-hours" means different things at different providers, so it’s worth being precise about what you’re actually buying.
What after-hours coverage actually includes
At its simplest it’s a live answer instead of voicemail. At its fullest it’s a complete overnight dispatch desk. Where a given service sits on that spectrum is the main thing that decides the price.
- Live call answering in your brand voice
- Booking trips directly into your dispatch software
- Dispatching and routing drivers for urgent work
- Handling cancellations, changes, and complaints
- Escalating true emergencies to your on-call person
What hours it covers
Typically the hours your office isn’t staffed: evenings after close, overnight, weekends, and public holidays. Many fleets start with overnight only — the highest-leak window — then add weekends and holidays once they see the recovered bookings. You define the exact schedule.
Stop losing fares to voicemail. We pick up the calls your in-house team cannot staff.
What it costs
After-hours plans usually price on talk time or a bundled monthly rate. A small fleet covering nights and weekends commonly lands from $650 a month, depending on call volume and how much real dispatch work the agents do. Compare that to one overnight employee at $50,000-plus a year and the math is rarely close.
How to size it
Pull your call logs and count the calls landing outside office hours. Multiply by your average booking value and a conservative conversion rate to see what the gap is worth. Then start with the window where you’re losing the most — almost always overnight — and expand as the recovered revenue proves out.
Common questions
Where this guide fits: it is part of the resource library from the desk. Next step: start a free week of 24/7 coverage.
Tom supervises after-hours and overflow coverage at SS Support Network. He has spent most of his career on nights and weekends keeping fleets answered when the office is closed, and writes about out-of-hours cover, escalation, and overflow handling.
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