After-hours support bot: nights and weekends covered
Customers keep asking after closing time. A bot shift answers them — and your morning starts at inbox zero on the routine stuff.
- A bot takes the night shift on every channel you run
- Tricky cases wait for morning — with an AI recap attached
- From $79/month; operators free and unlimited
What the night bot takes off your plate
The morning after, with and without a bot shift
Without cover, night questions pile into a backlog that eats the first two hours of every workday — and the customers who wrote at midnight are already annoyed by the time the first human reply lands.
With a bot on the night shift, the routine half of that backlog never exists: order status, password resets and "do you ship to…" are answered while you sleep, and only genuine edge cases wait for a person.
One night on autopilot
18:40 — office goes quiet
Chat stays open. The night bot picks up new conversations the moment they arrive — on chat, email and messengers.
02:14 — a real request
A customer needs a shipping address changed. The bot handles it end to end and confirms — no human woken up.
03:30 — an edge case
A billing dispute the bot isn't allowed to settle: it apologizes, sets expectations and queues the thread with an AI recap.
09:00 — team sits down
The queue holds only cases that need judgment. Everything else is already closed and logged in the autopilot report.
A sample month of night shifts, by the numbers
Auto-resolved overnight
sample month, one store lane
First reply after closing
median when a playbook matches
Left for the team at 9 am
edge-case threads, each recapped
Fair questions before you hand over the night
“Our customers hate talking to bots.”
They hate waiting until morning more. The night bot answers plainly, never pretends to be human, and offers a handover the moment someone asks — the difference is that routine questions get solved now instead of at 9 am.
“A bot will promise something we can't deliver.”
Playbooks set hard boundaries: what the bot may answer, which sources it trusts and what is always escalated. Outside those lines it says "I'll pass this to the team" — it doesn't improvise.
“We're too small for this to pay off.”
Solo at $79 a month covers 700 auto-resolved conversations — a fraction of what any night arrangement costs. If a quiet month uses less, you've still answered every 2 am customer in seconds.
A night shift, replaced
The founder of a two-person kitchenware store
- Was
- Evening ad campaigns brought orders — and a nightly wave of shipping questions his two-person team found every morning.
- Did
- Launched a night bot fed by the store's delivery and returns articles; edge cases queue for morning with recaps.
- Got
- Mornings start with a handful of real decisions instead of a full backlog, and midnight customers get answers in seconds.
- coverage across chat, email and messengers
- 24/7
- Solo plan — cheaper than any night arrangement
- $79
- languages answered from one knowledge base
- 50+
- free trial, no card required
- 14 days
Where to go next
Before you switch the lights off
- What does the bot do when it doesn't know the answer?
- It says so honestly, tells the customer when a human will follow up, and queues the thread with an AI summary. No invented answers, no dead ends — and escalated conversations don't count against your auto-resolve quota.
- Can I limit the bot to nights and weekends only?
- Yes. On the Fleet plan bots follow shifts and schedules you define; on any plan you can switch a bot's channels on and off in a click. Many teams start nights-only and widen the window once they trust the reports.
- Is $79 really the whole cost?
- Solo is $79 a month for 700 auto-resolved conversations, with operators free and unlimited. If volume grows you can add 1,000 auto-resolves for $42 or move to Squad at $189 — there are no per-seat fees on any plan.
- How fast can we start?
- Connect a channel, point the bot at your help articles and it can take tonight's shift. The 14-day trial needs no card, and the migration wizard imports your existing knowledge base over a weekend.