The questions your customers ask when you're closed, and how to answer them without being there

It's 9 p.m. on a Sunday. Your shop is closed, and someone has just written in through your website: "Do you do tune-ups without an appointment?" By Monday morning, that person may have found their answer at a competitor's.

Answering customers after hours doesn't require you to be there. You need answers written in advance for the questions that keep coming back and, for everything else, a message that clearly says when you'll reply. Being closed isn't a flaw; leaving a message unanswered, with no indication of what happens next, is.

What do your customers ask when you're closed?

Before choosing a tool, look at what your customers actually ask when you're not around. Your archives are all you need.

1. Gather a few weeks' worth of messages: emails, contact form submissions, social media messages, voicemail.
2. Keep only the ones that arrived outside your business hours: evenings, weekends, statutory holidays.
3. For each one, write down the question in a single sentence, without the customer's name.
4. Group similar questions together and count how often each group comes up.

If your business follows the seasons (a landscaper, a pool company), repeat the exercise for your slow period.

This short list, not what you imagine, guides the next steps.

Which questions can you answer in advance, and which need a human?

For each group, check three things.

• Is the answer the same for everyone? Hours, address, parking, payment methods, return policy: yes.
• Does it rarely change? Your list of services, yes. This week's wait time at the repair shop, no.
• Would a small mistake be harmless? A detail about parking, yes. A question about health, money or safety, no.

Three "yes" answers: the answer can be written in advance. A single "no": a human handles it, and your job is to acknowledge the request properly in the meantime.

The "Health, safety, emergency" row is non-negotiable, especially for a clinic. According to Quebec.ca's Info-Santé 811 page (checked on September 29, 2026), this telephone service is available 24 hours a day, 365 days a year: it's open when you aren't.

How do you answer customers after hours?

Four options, which can be combined, each with its own limit.

The after-hours message

An automatic reply by email or on your social media, or a voicemail greeting. Its job: to tell customers their message has been received and when they'll hear back.

Its limit: it doesn't answer any questions. Add your hours and the address of your FAQ page.

The FAQ on your website

Your inventory is a ready-made outline: each "answer in advance" group becomes an entry. Write the way you talk at the counter, with the answer in the first sentence and the heading worded the way the customer asks the question.

Its limits: customers have to find it, then read it. And a forgotten page gives wrong answers, like summer hours still posted in November. Put someone in charge of reviewing it every time the season changes.

An AI assistant on your website

A chat assistant can respond in everyday language to a question worded any which way, at 9 p.m. on a Sunday. When properly configured, it draws on the text you provide rather than on what it "thinks it knows."

Its limits:

• It's only as good as what you give it. If your return policy isn't written down anywhere, it has no good answer to offer.
• It can get things wrong, even with strict instructions. Try it with the real questions from your inventory before putting it on your site.
• It doesn't replace anyone for "human only" questions. A good assistant says it doesn't know and offers to hand the conversation over. Someone still has to be notified, and the customer still has to know when that person will reply.
• Your customers' messages leave your website, for the provider running the language model, often outside Quebec. Ask any provider where the data is stored and which countries the messages go to.

It's not the right solution if you only get a few messages a week after hours, if almost all your requests are for custom quotes, or if no one will have time to keep the answers up to date. A good FAQ and an after-hours message are enough in that case. Our article on choosing between an FAQ and an AI assistant goes through these cases.

The callback when you open

Sometimes the best answer is still a person calling back: the landscaper who needs to see the property, the unhappy customer who wants to be heard.

Its limit: the callback actually has to happen. Set aside a fixed block of time when you open to deal with whatever came in while you were closed, complaints and urgent requests first. And to call back, you need an email address or phone number: ask for them in your form.

For many small businesses, the right mix is an FAQ, an after-hours message that says when to expect a reply and a callback when you open. An AI assistant comes in once repetitive questions start to pile up.

What should you promise a customer who writes while you're closed?

• Give a specific time. "We'll reply by noon on Tuesday" is more reassuring than "as soon as possible."
• Leave yourself some margin. If you check your messages at 9 a.m., write "by noon," not "from 9 a.m."
• Say it where they write. A response time posted on your Contact page doesn't help someone writing on Facebook: each channel needs its own message.
• Plan for longer closures. The construction holiday, the holiday break, the off-season: update your after-hours message and your return date.
• Say what to do in an emergency. An on-call number, another resource, or the appropriate public service.
• Never write "a representative will reply live" if no one is watching messages in the evening. Also reread your tools' automatic messages: "someone will reply shortly" on a Saturday night promises the same thing.

Here's a sample after-hours message for a bike shop:

Thanks for your message! The shop is closed on Sundays and Mondays. We'll get back to you by noon on Tuesday. Our hours, how our repair shop works and our return policy are all in our FAQ: [your page's address]. For an urgent problem, call [number].

Where do you start this week?

1. Take stock of the messages you receive outside business hours.
2. Sort each group: answer written in advance, or a human.
3. Write or fix the answers in your FAQ.
4. Rewrite your after-hours message, in every channel, with a specific response time.
5. Set aside a fixed block of time when you open for callbacks.

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What does Echo Support do when you're closed, and what doesn't it do?

Echo Support, our product, is a chat window you paste onto your website. What it does while you're closed, as of October 2, 2026:

• On paid plans, an AI assistant answers from the articles in your help centre and the documents you upload (TXT or CSV). When it can't find the answer, it offers a person; visitors can also ask for one by saying so ("I'd like to talk to someone") or by clicking "Talk to a person."
• The handoff is visible. The conversation moves to "Needs human" in the inbox, and an escalation email goes to every team member, except those who turned it off under Configuration → Notifications. Run a test escalation to check that it arrives.
• Visitors leave their name and email address before their first message is sent: you'll be able to write to them when you open.
• The greeting message is yours. The first message of every conversation, whatever the plan, it's set in the widget customization (how-to): the right place for your hours and your response time.

What it doesn't do:

• It doesn't know your business hours. No setting gives them to the assistant. When it hands over, it writes its own message, with instructions to reassure: a person will help the visitor shortly. But if the visitor says "yes" to its offer and the model writes nothing, a fixed text goes out instead: it promises a reply "as soon as possible." On a Sunday evening, those are the promises to avoid. Put your hours and response time in the greeting message, and in a help article the assistant can quote.
• It stops answering new conversations beyond your plan's monthly cap of AI-handled conversations: it hands them over to your team until the 1st of the next month. The widget tells the visitor that someone will reply, and an escalation email lets you know. It also hands over after 15 visitor messages in a single conversation.
• It has no instruction of its own for health or emergency questions. Publish a help article that points to Info-Santé 811, or to 911 in an emergency: the assistant can find it, with no guarantee that it will.
• It doesn't notify visitors by email when you reply in the chat window. If they've left, write to the address they gave.
• The free plan has no AI assistant. Every conversation waits for a person there, and the chat window doesn't tell visitors when they'll hear back: that's your greeting message's job. The "New Conversation" email goes to every member by default; each one turns it off for themselves under Configuration → Notifications.
• It doesn't keep conversations forever. Since September 28, 2026, every night, a conversation is deleted once its last message is older than your plan's history period (the periods are on the pricing page). Before a long closure, check that this period covers it.

In a pilot program by invitation, the assistant can also look up a Shopify order before answering "Where's my order?"

The application and its database are hosted in Beauharnois, Quebec. The text handled by the AI goes to OpenRouter, in the United States, which routes it to DeepInfra (United States or Canada) or, failing that, Microsoft Azure (United States). Indexing your articles and documents, the assistant's searches and, on paid plans, a masked summary of each resolved conversation go through Cohere, a Canadian company whose place of computation is not guaranteed to be Canada. Sensitive information is not masked before it is sent to the model. The full list of providers is here.