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Blogs · July 2026

How should an insurer handle claims calls out of hours?

Losses do not happen between nine and five. Here is what a workable out-of-hours setup has to do, and why taking a message is not it.

The short answer: the out-of-hours line has to do the job, not just record that somebody rang. That means taking the first notice of loss properly, answering what the policy actually covers, telling the customer what happens next, and getting a person involved immediately when the case needs one. If your current arrangement takes a message and calls back on Tuesday, you have not covered the window. You have logged it.

Why does the out-of-hours window matter so much in insurance?

Because of when losses happen.

The pipe bursts at midnight. The car is written off on a Sunday afternoon. The flight is cancelled on a bank holiday. Insurance is the one product where the customer contacts you at the worst moment of their year, and that moment does not respect your rota.

It is also the moment the relationship is decided. A policyholder who has paid premiums for six years and finally needs you does not grade you on your renewal price. They grade you on whether anyone picked up.

An honest note on the numbers. You will see confident claims that some particular percentage of insurance contact lands outside office hours. We are not going to repeat them, because when we went looking for a citable UK source, there was not one. Firms hold this internally. Pull your own call data by hour and day and you will have a number your board trusts, which is more use than one from a vendor deck.

What is wrong with an answering service or a voicemail?

Nothing, if all you want is a message. The problem is what the message becomes.

A message becomes a callback. A callback becomes a queue. By the time you ring back, the customer has spent a night with a flooded kitchen not knowing whether they are covered, or has already rung the next insurer on their list. The claim still gets registered, just later and with a worse start.

The regulator has now put a name to the harm this causes. Reviewing home and travel claims handling, the FCA found that "claims service and delivery" was the main root cause of complaints, and specifically criticised firms for managing expectations on timescales poorly and not keeping customers updated on their claim's progress. An overnight message that becomes a next-working-day callback builds exactly that failure into the process on purpose.

And people do give up. In that same review, the FCA found 19% of storm-claim customers walked away without pursuing the claim.

There is a human version of this too. In consumer research published by ALA Insurance, 41% said the thing that most infuriates them about insurers is not being able to speak to a person on the phone. It is a consumer poll rather than market data, so treat it as a mood reading, not a metric. But it is the right mood.

What does a workable out-of-hours setup actually have to do?

Four things. If your arrangement does not do all four, it is a message service wearing a better name.

  • Answer the call. Not a queue, not a voicemail. Answered at 3am, during a storm, when forty people ring at once.
  • Take the first notice of loss properly. Get the policy, the incident, the date, the damage, the photographs, the immediate risk. Enough that a handler can pick it up in the morning and act, rather than starting the conversation from nothing.
  • Answer the question they actually rang with. "Am I covered for this?" "Can I get someone out tonight?" "What do I do with the car?" Answered from your own policy wordings and your own process, not improvised.
  • Escalate a real emergency to a person, immediately. An uninhabitable home, a vulnerable customer, an injury, a claim already in dispute. These do not wait for morning, and a competent overnight setup knows the difference.

What does Atlantas.Ai do overnight?

It answers the phone, the email, the web chat and the social message, all night, from one knowledge base built on your own documents.

  • It takes the FNOL in full and writes it into the claims platform you already run, so the morning team opens a claim, not a voicemail.
  • It answers coverage and process questions from your policy wordings, and shows where the answer came from. If the wording does not cover it, it says so and escalates rather than guessing.
  • It hands over to a person when the case needs one. Emergency, vulnerability, dispute, complaint. With the context attached.
  • It keeps people updated while the claim runs, which is the gap the regulator has been pointing at.

Your handlers arrive to claims that are already registered, triaged and evidenced, instead of a queue of callbacks.

Frequently asked questions

Will customers know they are speaking to an AI agent?

Yes. It says so. Pretending otherwise is a conduct risk and it is not worth the deception.

What happens if it does not know the answer?

It says it does not know and gets a person, rather than guessing. That is a designed route, not a failure.

Does this replace our out-of-hours team?

It covers the window you cannot staff, and it takes the volume of routine calls off the people you do have, so they spend the night on the cases that genuinely need a human.

Does it work with our claims platform?

It sits alongside your telephony, CRM and claims platform. It does not replace them.

Sources

See Atlantas.Ai answer for your own book.

Every call, email, chat and message, grounded in your own policy wordings, with a person on hand the moment a case needs one.