Pattern 2
A voice agent for the hours your line is closed, that your team still trusts by morning.
Out of hours is where most teams put their first voice agent, and where most pilots stall. The pattern is a small set of queries the agent finishes end to end, with voicemail kept for everything else until the pass rate says otherwise.
The shape of it
What changes and what stays
First set
Few queries
Each one finishes without a person
Everything else
Voicemail
Unchanged until the set passes
Threshold
99%
Graded calls passing, per query type
Then
Overflow
The same agent takes daytime peaks
The maths
Why the line closes at five
Your centre staffs for its busiest hour, because the queue maths punishes anything less. In the worked example on the queue maths page, a centre taking 30 calls an hour at 4 minutes each needs 4 people on the phones to answer 80 per cent of calls within 20 seconds, and the average wait climbs from 21 seconds to 107 when one of them is off sick.
That staffing cost applies to every hour you open. So you pay for one 8-hour window, and the 6pm caller gets the voicemail.
In Australia the window is narrower than it looks. A line staffed 9 to 5 in Sydney closes at 3pm in Perth (AEST is UTC+10, AWST is UTC+8), and at 2pm once daylight saving starts on the east coast. The agent that covers the gap is the same one described on Australian AI voice agents, on an Australian number, with the rate published on that page.
Explainer
The pattern in 87 seconds
Where pilots stall
Better than voicemail is the wrong target
After five, the agent competes with an IVR menu and a voicemail box. That makes “better than voicemail” an easy target, and most pilots aim at it.
A general-purpose agent pointed at every after-hours call takes the missed-delivery complaint it cannot resolve into a 5-minute conversation that ends nowhere. Your staff read that transcript at 8am. From then on they route around the agent, and the pilot stays a pilot.
The fix is scope. Take the calls the agent finishes, and leave the voicemail in place for the rest until the numbers say otherwise.
The pattern
Five steps
01
Pick the queries the agent finishes end to end
Rescheduling an appointment, or confirming whether an invoice has been paid. Each one has a definite end the agent reaches without a person. A missed-delivery complaint does not, so it is out of the set.
02
Leave everything else on voicemail
Outside the set, the caller gets the same voicemail they get today. A pilot that takes every call replaces the voicemail with a conversation that ends nowhere, and the caller would have preferred the voicemail.
03
Write each query as a scenario first
A scripted caller plays the query against the agent and a judge grades the result. The scenario is the definition of done for that query, and it runs again on every change to the agent (docs.meddle.sh/docs/operate/evals).
04
Hold each query until it passes 99 per cent
Our threshold for a query type to leave the pilot is 99 per cent of graded calls passing. Below it, the query stays in scenarios and the caller stays on voicemail. Your team reads the morning transcripts, and the pass rate is the number they trust.
05
Then route it the daytime overflow
An agent that finishes a query at 9pm finishes it at 10am. Forward the busy line to it at peak, and the calls that would have queued past your wait target get answered. The roster covers the calls that need a person.
The payoff
The same agent on the daytime queue
Once a query type passes, the night line is the smaller of the two benefits. The larger one is daytime overflow: forward the busy line to the agent at peak, and the calls that would have queued past your target are answered by an agent that has already proved it can finish them. The mechanics are on the queue maths page, and the forwarding options are on inbound calls.
At that point the roster covers the calls that need a person, and you size it for those instead of for the worst hour of the week.
On Meddle
Building it
Hours
Answering hours
Set the hours the agent answers and the message it plays outside them. A caller outside the hours can leave a message instead of talking to the agent.
Scope
One query type at a time
The prompt says which queries the agent takes and which it declines. A declined query goes to a message, in your words, and the transcript shows the decline.
Proof
Scenarios and a judge
Write the 9pm query as a scenario, run it, and read the grade. The scenario runs again on every change to the agent (docs.meddle.sh/docs/operate/evals).
After
Every call in the transcript
Each call is stored turn by turn with timings and scores, and you choose the retention window. The morning read is a list, and the pass rate is a number.
Last updated 4 September 2026
Questions
Before you point the night line at it
Which queries should an out-of-hours voice agent take first?
Should the agent take every after-hours call?
What pass rate should a query type reach before it leaves the pilot?
Can the same agent handle daytime overflow?
Does Meddle support answering hours?
Write the first query as a scenario.
Build the agent, script the query you would hand it at 9pm, and read the graded transcript. Point real callers at it after it passes.