Set up an after-hours AI receptionist that books jobs

The outcome of this guide is a working after-hours receptionist that runs on text messages. When a customer texts your business number at 8pm, the assistant answers in your words, checks your knowledge base, offers a real appointment time, and books it. Complaints and anything it is unsure about get handed to a person the next morning. By the end you will have this live on a dedicated Australian number and tested from your own phone.

This is a Premium feature. The AI assistant, together with the team inbox, is what turns a one-way sending tool into something that holds a conversation.

What you need first

• An SMS365 workspace on a plan that includes the AI assistant.
• A dedicated number so replies come back to you two-way. You add one under Add-ons for about $10 per month. Without it, a customer has nowhere to reply, and an after-hours receptionist with no reply path is just an auto-responder.
• Prepaid credit topped up under Billing, because each message the assistant sends is a real send.
• Your opening hours, your typical services, and answers to the ten questions customers ask most. Have these written down before you start.

Step by step setup

1. Add the dedicated number. Open Add-ons and buy a dedicated Australian number. This becomes the number customers see and reply to. Give it a day to settle in and send yourself a plain test message from Compose to confirm two-way replies land back in your workspace.
2. Open the AI assistant page. Go to Settings and then AI assistant. You will see three modes: Off, Suggest replies, and Reply automatically. Leave it on Off for now while you fill in the content underneath.
3. Write the business context. This is the short description the assistant reasons from. Cover who you are, what you do, your hours, your tone, and what you want it to push toward. Keep it plain and specific.

   We are Kingsway Plumbing, a residential plumbing business in Perth. Hours are 7am to 4pm weekdays. After hours we take bookings for the next available slot and flag genuine emergencies such as burst pipes or no water. Tone is friendly, direct, and Australian. Always try to book the customer in rather than tell them to call back. Never quote a fixed price for a job you have not seen.

4. Build the knowledge base. Below the context, paste your FAQs, your standard prices or price ranges, your service area, your cancellation policy, and anything else you repeat daily. The assistant answers from this, so if it is not written here it will not be said. Add a line for each real question.

   Call-out fee is $95 including the first 30 minutes. We service the northern suburbs up to Joondalup. We do not do gas fitting. A booking can be moved or cancelled free up to 12 hours before. Emergencies are burst pipes, no water, or sewage backup, and we aim to reach these same day.

5. Connect your appointments. The assistant can only book against slots it can see. Make sure your appointments are being created in SMS365, either by hand or through the API, so the assistant has real times to offer. When it books one, the reminder countdown fans out automatically, and a cancellation refunds the reminder that was never sent.
6. Start in Suggest replies mode. Set the mode to Suggest replies. In this mode the assistant drafts a reply for your staff to approve rather than sending on its own. Run it like this for a few days so you can read what it would have said before it says it to a customer. This is the safest way to build trust in the content you pasted.
7. Move to Reply automatically. Once the drafts read the way you would answer, switch the mode to Reply automatically. Now it answers after hours without a person in the loop. It will book and cancel appointments, add a contact to a list, look up an invoice, and record a promise to pay, all inside the conversation.

The safety rails that are always on

Auto mode does not mean the assistant answers everything. It never auto-replies to a STOP message or to a number that has opted out, because those are compliance actions, not conversations. It hands complaints to a person rather than trying to smooth them over. Anything it cannot answer from your knowledge base becomes a thread waiting for you, not a guess. This is deliberate, and it is why auto mode is safe to leave running overnight.

What the customer sees

A customer texts your number at 8:40pm: "Hey do you fix hot water systems? Ours has died." The assistant replies in seconds, drawing on the context and knowledge base:

Hi, yes we do. No hot water is something we can look at first thing. Our call-out is $95 including the first half hour. I can get someone to you tomorrow between 8 and 10am, or 1 and 3pm. Which suits?

The customer replies "morning please". The assistant books the slot, confirms it, and the reminder for the morning is already scheduled:

Done, you are booked for tomorrow 8 to 10am. We will text you a reminder in the morning. If anything changes just reply here. Kingsway Plumbing.

If instead the customer had texted "I am furious, your guy never showed today", the assistant would not try to resolve it. It flags the thread and leaves it for a person, so the first human contact is an apology from you, not a defensive bot.

Test it before you rely on it

Text your own dedicated number from a phone that is not logged into the workspace. Try three things: a normal booking question, a question whose answer is only in your knowledge base such as your call-out fee, and a made-up complaint. Confirm the booking one books, the knowledge one answers correctly, and the complaint one is held for a person rather than answered. If the assistant invents a price or a policy you did not write down, that means the fact is missing from the knowledge base, so add it and test again.

How this fits the rest of your setup

An after-hours receptionist is one of several jobs the assistant can do once it is answering texts. If most of your after-hours contact starts as a missed phone call, pair this with a missed-call flow so the ring becomes a text conversation, covered in how a missed call turns into a booked job. For the wider picture of what the assistant can and cannot do, read letting AI answer your customer texts. The quality of every answer depends on what you paste in step 4, so building a good knowledge base is worth the extra half hour. And because the whole thing rests on replies coming back to you, why two-way SMS matters explains why the dedicated number is not optional.

An honest word on delivery

SMS365 marks a message "sent" when it has been handed to the carrier, and "delivered" only when a genuine delivery receipt returns. For a conversation this rarely matters, because the customer replying is your proof it arrived. But it is worth knowing the status you see is real rather than assumed.

Once this is running, the practical change is simple. The bookings that used to fall into a voicemail nobody checked until Monday now land as confirmed jobs by morning. See where an AI receptionist fits alongside the other things the platform does on the use cases page.