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The calling window is the hours a campaign is allowed to dial. There are two ways to run it: a standard window you set by hand, and AI After Hours, where the AI only calls in the gaps around your human team.

The two modes

Mode here means the window, not how you dial. Speed to lead and power dialer live in When and how often.
Every campaign starts on Standard. Switch to AI After Hours only when a human team is doing the calling and you want the AI to cover the off hours.

Standard calling window

Set the days of the week and a start and end time, like Monday to Friday, 9am to 5pm. A few things worth knowing:
  • Split days are fine. You can set more than one block on the same day, say to skip the lunch hour.
  • Windows can cross midnight. An overnight window like 10pm to 6am is allowed. It just closes the next morning.
  • No window means no limit. Leave it off and the campaign can dial any hour of any day.
If a lead comes in outside your hours, it is not lost. The campaign queues it and places the call the moment your window next opens, so an after hours signup on a Friday night is waiting at the front of the line first thing Monday.

AI After Hours

AI After Hours has one rule: the AI never calls while your human team is working. It only picks up the hours they don’t cover. You give it two things:
  1. Your human rep schedule, the days and hours your people work, in their timezone.
  2. AI calling limits, the earliest and latest the AI is ever allowed to dial, so it never calls someone at 3am.
The AI then works only the gap between the two: the time inside your AI limits that falls outside your team’s hours, in each lead’s own local time. During your team’s hours the AI stays silent. Outside your AI limits nobody calls at all.
6:30am to 8am
AI calls
8am to 5pm
Human reps work
(AI stays out)
5pm to 10pm
AI calls

Example: human team 8am to 5pm, AI limits 6:30am to 10pm. The AI works only the two blue gaps. Before 6:30am and after 10pm, no one calls.

No human team? Turn the human schedule off. The AI then covers your whole calling window on the days you pick. This is the simplest way to run a single strict window with no human handoff.

What happens to a lead that arrives outside the window

This is the part that actually matters, and it is the difference between the two modes. When a fresh lead comes in outside the allowed hours, the campaign does one of two things: Why the difference? In AI After Hours, a lead that arrives during your human team’s hours is theirs to handle. If the AI merely held it, it would call that same person later that evening, after your reps already worked them. So After Hours drops those leads instead of queuing them, keeping the AI to genuine after hours work.
Because AI After Hours drops leads that land outside the window, a lead that comes in while your team is working will not get an AI call at all. That is the point, but it means your human team has to actually work those leads.

Whose clock is the window measured in?

By default the window runs on your business timezone, so everyone is dialed on your clock. Turn on the contact timezone setting and the window instead runs on each contact’s own local time. That same setting also tells the AI agent what time it is for the lead, so it changes more than just the window.

Contact timezone, in full

How the contact timezone setting works, everywhere it applies, and where the timezone comes from.

Where it sits with the rest

The window decides when you are allowed to call. It works alongside the dial style and retry cadence, which decide how and how often. Before you flip a campaign live, sanity check all three, see Going live.