Peak hours

Peak hours are the recurring periods when a clinic's phone and message volume is at its highest, usually at opening time, lunchtime and the end of the working day.

Every clinic has a rhythm. Clients call when they wake up and notice something about their pet, on their lunch break, and on the drive home. Those moments rarely line up with a quiet front desk. Opening time is also when clients arrive for morning appointments, so the same people who should be answering the phone are checking pets in, taking payments and settling waiting-room questions.

What the research shows

Peaks are well documented in the wider sector. A 2018 Moneypenny analysis of thousands of calls to UK vet practices, published by VetShow, found that Monday between 9 and 10am had the highest volume of emergency calls. Your own pattern may differ, which is why it is worth measuring.

Finding your own peaks

Your phone system's call log is the best source. Export a few weeks of calls and group them by hour and weekday. Look at both the total calls and the unanswered ones: the hours where missed calls cluster are your real peaks, even when total volume looks similar to other times. Mondays, days after a public holiday and the first warm days of spring often stand out.

Planning around them

Once you know your peaks, you can staff the phones to match. Common moves are scheduling an extra person on the phones for the first hour, keeping routine outbound calls out of peak times, moving admin work to quieter afternoons, and arranging for calls that cannot be reached in time to go somewhere other than voicemail.

An example

At a two-vet clinic, the practice manager pulls a month of call logs and finds that most unanswered calls happen between opening and mid-morning, and again just before closing. She shifts one receptionist's lunch, moves reminder calls to early afternoon and sets up cover for overflow calls during those two windows. Front-desk staff report a calmer start to the day.

How Tilly handles it

Tilly can run in overflow mode, answering only the calls your team can't reach in time, or on a weekly schedule that matches your busiest hours. Every call it answers appears in your dashboard with a summary.

To find your own peaks, follow the missed-call audit. Related: phone rota and overflow answering.