What counts as an urgent call after hours?
Write the urgency test as questions a caller can answer, not as internal job codes. A caller at 11pm cannot tell you whether a fault is 'priority one', but they can say whether water is still running, whether the whole property has lost power or whether they are locked out with a child inside. Keep the list short and specific to your work. Anything outside it becomes a detailed message for the morning. A caller who describes a risk to someone's life or safety should be told to hang up and call 000 before anything else is asked.
- Is the problem still happening now, or has it stopped?
- Can the caller make it safe themselves, for example by turning the water off at the meter?
- Is a vulnerable person affected, such as an elderly resident or a young child?
- Is this an existing customer or site you have agreed to cover after hours?
Who should be on the roster, and in what order?
Each shift needs a primary contact, a backup and an escalation owner, often the manager or business owner, who is called only when the first two cannot be reached. Publish the roster by role and date, and keep the phone numbers in one controlled list that the answering service reads from. When two staff swap a shift, the change should be made in that list, not agreed by text message between them. Check that every number on the roster belongs to a phone the person will actually carry, rather than a desk phone or a shared work mobile left in a vehicle overnight.
How should the answering service reach the on-call person?
Agree the contact sequence in writing. One workable sequence is a phone call, then a text message with the summary, then a second call after a set interval, then the backup. The text matters because a person woken at 2am needs the details in front of them before calling back. Decide whether the service transfers the caller live or passes the details for a callback. Live transfer suits short, urgent calls. A callback suits jobs where the technician needs a minute to check the site history or job notes first.
- Caller name and the number to call back
- Site address and any access notes
- What is happening, in the caller's own words
- What the caller was told, including any time given
What happens when nobody responds?
Define acknowledgement before go-live. A missed call to the on-call phone is not acknowledgement, and neither is a text that was delivered but not read. Acknowledgement means the on-call person answered, replied or called the customer. If that does not happen within the time you set, the service moves to the backup, then to the escalation owner. If nobody responds, the caller should hear the truth: the details have been recorded and the team will see them first thing. The script should never promise a callback within a set time unless the roster is staffed to keep that promise.
What do Fair Work rules say about contacting on-call staff?
The right to disconnect has applied to employees of small business employers, meaning employers with fewer than 15 employees, since 26 August 2025. Employees can refuse to monitor, read or respond to contact from their employer or a third party outside working hours, unless the refusal is unreasonable. One factor the Fair Work Ombudsman lists is how much the employee is paid to be available or to work extra hours. So the roster needs an agreed, paid arrangement before the first shift, not an expectation that whoever answers will deal with it.
Awards add their own rules. The Electrical, Electronic and Communications Contracting Award 2020 sets an availability-for-duty allowance and minimum payments when an employee is called out, and the Plumbing and Fire Sprinklers Award 2020 sets on-call allowances for fire sprinkler employees. This is administrative guidance only: check the award or agreement that covers your staff, or ask the Fair Work Ombudsman.
How do you keep the roster working after launch?
Review every after-hours escalation the next morning. For each one, record whether it met the urgency test, how long acknowledgement took and what happened next. Calls that woke someone for a job that could have waited mean the questions need tightening. Urgent calls that ended up as morning messages mean the test is too narrow or the contact sequence failed. Re-test the sequence whenever someone changes phones, carriers or do-not-disturb settings, and check the roster again before public holidays and shutdown periods, when leave and swaps change who is available.