After-Hours Answering & Emergency Triage Agent

Customer Service

After-Hours Answering & Emergency Triage Agent

Answers the customers who write in after your office closes. Routine questions get a reply drawn only from information you approved, anything it cannot answer honestly becomes a next-day callback with a ticket, and genuine emergencies page whoever is on your on-call rota — chasing them until somebody acknowledges, then escalating to a manager.

How it works

Every five minutes the agent checks the mailbox you connect it to. It skips anything it has already handled, anything from your own team, and anything older than two days. It works out whether you are open, from the opening hours you enter and a Holidays tab you can edit yourself. A message that arrives during opening hours is recorded once and left for your staff — the agent does not answer over the top of them. It then reads the message and classifies it against a triage guide that lives in your own spreadsheet: severity, category, criteria and keywords, all editable without a developer. Two rules are deliberately one-way. The guide's keywords can only raise a case's severity, never lower it, and a separate safety wordlist can only raise it to emergency. Nothing the model says can talk a case down. Routine questions are answered from the approved information you supply, and only from that. If the answer is not in there, the agent says so rather than guessing, and books a callback instead. It will not quote a price, a time or a policy you have not written down. Emergencies go to whoever is on your rota for that day and time. The agent chases them roughly every fifteen minutes, up to four times. If nobody acknowledges, it escalates to your manager with the whole timeline and tells the customer honestly that it has not reached anyone yet. Anything that reads like a risk to life or safety is told to call the emergency services first, before the agent does anything else. That advice is worded as a standing precaution, so it is harmless when the match was a false alarm. Every case, decision, reminder and acknowledgement is written to a Cases tab and an append-only Log, with timestamps and the reason each choice was made. Two things to know before you switch it on. The agent replies from the Gmail account you connect and reads that same account's inbox, so give it the mailbox your customers actually write to. And if you leave the approved information empty, it will never answer automatically — every message becomes a callback instead.

What's included

The key things this template does for you.

A Google Sheets workbook created on the first run, with Cases, TriageGuide, OnCall, Holidays and Log tabs, headers and worked examples already filled in

An emergency classification guide you own and edit in the spreadsheet — change a keyword, change the behaviour, no developer needed

Keyword and safety rules that can only raise a case's severity, never lower it, so a missed emergency takes two independent failures rather than one

An on-call rota that understands weekdays, specific dates and shifts that cross midnight, with a fallback contact for when nobody is rostered

Repeated alerting roughly every fifteen minutes until a human acknowledges, then a manager escalation carrying the whole timeline

Automatic answers drawn only from information you approve, with a hard refusal to invent a price, a time, an availability or a policy

Next-day callbacks that a person has to confirm — the agent cannot close that status by itself, and chases until somebody does

Standing advice to call the emergency services whenever a message mentions fire, gas, injury or anyone in danger

Business hours, holidays and timezone you control, plus an append-only log of every decision and the reason behind it

Installation

What setting this up involves.

Answer the setup questions: your business name and what you do, your opening hours and timezone, the mailbox this agent watches, your on-call and escalation addresses, your emergency services number, the information it is allowed to quote, and the callback window you want to promise.

Connect Gmail and Google Sheets when prompted. Two tools, two prompts. The Gmail account you pick is both the inbox it reads and the address it replies from.

Run it once and let it settle. It creates the workbook, seeds the triage guide, the on-call rota and the holiday list, then goes quiet until something arrives.

Open the workbook. Put your real people in the OnCall tab, your real closure dates in Holidays, and tune the TriageGuide keywords to your trade. Keywords only ever raise severity, so keep them specific.

Send a test message from an outside address while you are closed, and watch the case appear in Cases with the reason for its classification in the Log.

~5 min to launch

Free to start. You will sign in first, then set it up.

Connect 2 tools, fill in a few details, and install it. No coding.

FUNCTION

Customer Service