Recipe — Business hours with voicemail fallback

Route every caller to your support queue during business hours; outside business hours, play a short after-hours message and send the caller to voicemail. The most common starter flow.

What this flow does

• During business hours: caller hears a greeting, then lands in the support queue.
• Outside business hours: caller hears an after-hours message, then is taken to voicemail.
• Voicemail messages become new conversations in your inbox, so the team can follow up the next business day.

Before you start

• A phone number provisioned in Settings → Voice.
• A support queue configured with a team that can take calls.
• Opening hours configured for your tenant (in Settings → Opening Hours). The Is Open node reads from this configuration.

Build it

In the IVR builder for your phone number, add the following nodes and connect them in this order:

• 1 — Incoming Call — Auto-added — the entry point.
• 2 — Is Open — Reads your opening hours. Two outputs: Open and Closed.
• 3a — Say Message (Open branch) — “Thanks for calling. We’re connecting you now.”
• 4a — Send to Queue (Open branch) — Pick your support queue.
• 3b — Say Message (Closed branch) — “Thanks for calling. We’re closed right now — please leave a message and we’ll get back to you the next business day.”
• 4b — Voicemail (Closed branch) — Records the caller’s message and ends the call.

Visual shape

Incoming Call
     │
     ▼
   Is Open ─── Open ──▶ Say Message ──▶ Send to Queue
     │
   Closed
     ▼
 Say Message ──▶ Voicemail

Test before going live

1. Open the IVR builder, save the flow, and assign it to the phone number.
2. Inside business hours: dial the number — you should land in the support queue.
3. Outside business hours (or temporarily change opening hours to a 1-minute window for testing): dial the number — you should hear the after-hours message and be taken to voicemail.
4. Leave a voicemail and confirm the conversation appears in the inbox with the recording attached.

Variants

Holidays

If you’ve added a holiday to your opening hours configuration, the Is Open node treats the holiday as a closed day automatically — the call routes to the voicemail branch. No flow change needed.

Different closed message by day of week

For weekend-vs-weekday-specific messages, replace the single Closed-branch Say Message with a Condition node that branches on the current day, with a different Say Message for each.

Callback offer outside hours

If you want to offer a callback during business hours and voicemail outside, replace the queue’s Send to Queue node with a Callback Queue node on the Open branch — and keep the Voicemail on the Closed branch. See Configure callback.

Troubleshooting

• Symptom: Calls land in voicemail even though you’re inside business hours. Fix: Check Settings → Opening Hours and confirm the rule is correct for the day and time you’re testing. Time zones are a common cause — the rule applies in the tenant’s timezone, not the caller’s.

• Symptom: Voicemails are recorded but the audio is silent. Fix: Verify that the Voicemail node is the terminal step on the closed branch and that the flow ends there. Recording cuts off if the flow tries to continue past Voicemail.

• Symptom: The Open branch routes to the queue but nobody answers. Fix: The queue has no agents available. Open the queue and confirm at least one agent is marked Available. See Set up a call queue.