Fielding inbound calls outside business hours and routing real emergencies to an on-call technician.
After-hours dispatch is the umbrella term for handling calls that come in outside normal business hours — evenings, nights, weekends, holidays — in a way that captures real emergencies, deflects routine work to the next business day, and keeps the contractor’s on-call rotation informed.
The typical after-hours dispatch pipeline has four stages: answer (the call is picked up within a few rings by a live human, an AI agent, or a voicemail), triage (the responder decides whether the call is an emergency, a routine booking, or a non-actionable inquiry), route (real emergencies are paged to the on-call tech; routine bookings are scheduled; non-actionable inquiries get a callback time), and follow-through (the system confirms an accepted dispatch or escalates if the first tech does not respond).
Most small contractors run this pipeline informally: the owner is the after-hours dispatcher. That works at low volume and breaks at higher volume or when the owner needs to sleep.
Emergency calls do not respect business hours. A frozen pipe at 2 AM, a sparking panel at 11 PM, a leaking roof during a storm at 4 AM — these are the calls that justify the existence of a service business. They are also the calls most likely to be lost: ~65% of US callers will hang up rather than leave a voicemail. A working after-hours dispatch is the difference between capturing those jobs and losing them to the next contractor on the customer’s phone list.
Night Watch is the after-hours dispatch pipeline as a service: a Vapi-powered AI agent answers within two rings, applies trade-aware triage, books routine work via live calendar availability, and routes verified emergencies through the Bulldog 3x3 dispatch loop. Every call is recorded (with The Vault), transcribed, and stored as a call memo the contractor can review in the morning.