After-Hours Answering Service
24/7 phone answering, overflow and fault-line cover for New Zealand and Australian businesses - from people who've been answering at 2am for 35+ years
Your phones, answered when you can't
Telnet's after-hours answering service picks up your calls nights, weekends, public holidays and whenever your team is busy. Onshore contact centre agents in New Zealand and Australia answer in your brand's name, follow your escalation rules and log every call - with Tulip AI taking routine calls instantly, 24/7.
We're not a generic message-taking bureau. Telnet is a full call centre and contact centre that has run 24/7 utility fault lines for decades, so our agents are trained to your products and processes - not reading a pad of "who called and why".
Use us for after-hours only, for overflow when your queue gets long, or both. Calls switch over on a schedule or automatically, and your customers never know the difference.
Get After-Hours CoverEvery hour, every day
Including public holidays
Hold time with Tulip
AI answers on the first ring
Years of experience
Running contact centres since 1989
Onshore
Agents in NZ & Australia
Three ways to use our answering service
Most clients start with one and add the others. All three run on the same agents, the same knowledge of your business and the same reporting.
After-hours call centre
Nights, weekends and public holidays. Calls divert to Telnet when your office closes and come back when it opens. Customers get a real answer instead of voicemail, and your team arrives to calls already logged rather than a backlog to return.
Overflow call centre
During business hours, calls roll to us when your queue passes a wait time you set, or when your team is in training or a meeting. You keep your in-house team right-sized for a normal day and stop losing customers on the busy ones.
Fault & emergency lines
For utilities, EV charging networks, property and infrastructure operators: faults logged properly, urgent jobs escalated to your on-call staff by your rules, and customers kept informed. This is the work we're best known for.
AI answers the routine.
People take the rest.
Overnight, most calls are the same few questions. Tulip, our AI voice assistant, answers those on the first ring - outage updates, opening hours, account questions, fault logging - at any volume and at any hour.
When a call is urgent, emotional or simply needs judgement, Tulip transfers it to a Telnet agent with full context, so nobody repeats their story. You get round-the-clock cover without paying for a full overnight roster.
See How Tulip WorksCalls are answered in your name, using your knowledge base and your escalation rules.
Requests go straight into your CRM or job system, or ours - not an email of messages to re-key.
On-call staff paged or called by your rules, with every escalation recorded.
Real-time reporting on what came in overnight and what happened to it.
A phone answering service built for serious call volumes
Telnet suits organisations whose after-hours calls actually matter - where a missed call is a missed fault, a lost customer or a story in the news.
- Energy and utility companies needing 24/7 fault and outage lines
- EV charging networks and fuel retailers whose customers need help at 2am
- Government agencies and not-for-profits extending their hours
- Australian businesses wanting an onshore call centre for Australia without building one
- Any in-house team that wants an inbound call centre partner for overflow
Storms, outages and sudden spikes
After-hours cover handles the normal night. When a storm or outage multiplies call volumes, our emergency and surge call centre service takes over - the same agents, plus shared resourcing and AI that scale within minutes.
During Cyclone Tam, Tulip handled 33% of all inbound calls with zero hold time. When lockdown hit, we stood up 35 agents in 24 hours for Lotto NZ.
Everything runs on ContactSuite, our own contact centre platform, so your knowledge, scripts and reporting stay the same whichever service is answering.
After-hours answering service FAQs
What is an after-hours answering service?
An after-hours answering service picks up your calls when your own team has gone home, so customers reach a person (or a capable AI assistant) instead of voicemail. Telnet answers after-hours, weekend and public-holiday calls for New Zealand and Australian businesses, logs every call into your systems and escalates anything urgent to your on-call staff.
What's the difference between an after-hours answering service and an overflow call centre?
After-hours covers the times your office is closed; overflow covers the times it’s open but busy. Telnet does both: calls route to us on a schedule, when your queue passes a wait threshold, or when your team is unavailable - and the customer hears your brand either way.
Is there a phone answering service in New Zealand that runs 24/7?
Yes. Telnet runs a 24/7 phone answering service from New Zealand, with onshore agents in New Zealand and Australia. We have handled utility fault lines around the clock for decades - including 2am on Christmas Day - so after-hours coverage is our everyday work, not an add-on.
What is an AI voice assistant and when does it hand over to a person?
An AI voice assistant answers a phone call and holds a natural spoken conversation to resolve routine requests. Telnet’s assistant, Tulip, answers on the first ring, gives updates and logs requests, then transfers to a human agent with full context the moment a call is urgent, emotional or outside what it should handle.
Is Telnet's contact centre onshore?
Yes - 100% onshore. Our agents are based in New Zealand and Australia, working on Telnet’s own ContactSuite platform. We don’t offshore calls.
How much does an after-hours answering service cost?
Cost depends on your call volume, hours and how much each call needs to do. Telnet uses a blended, pay-per-interaction model: you pay for the calls we actually handle rather than for idle seats overnight, and routine calls handled by Tulip cost less again. Talk to us for a quote based on your volumes.
Can you handle emergency and fault calls after hours?
Yes. Telnet is the contact centre behind fault lines for more than half of New Zealand’s electricity networks. We follow your escalation rules, dispatch or page on-call staff, and log every fault so your team starts the morning with a clean record. See our utility contact centre work.
Stop sending customers to voicemail
Tell us your hours, volumes and what each call needs to do. We'll show you how after-hours and overflow cover would work for your business.
Talk to Us