If something else answers your phone, you have to decide when. It sounds like a small configuration question and it is actually a set of decisions about what kind of business you want to be on the phone, and most people set it once without thinking and leave it wrong for months.
The four options
Only when you are closed. The most cautious setting. Your team answers during opening hours, and evenings, nights and weekends go to the system.
Good for: testing it without touching anything that currently works. Misses: every call that rings out at two in the afternoon because everyone is busy — which for most salons and restaurants is the larger problem.
Only when nobody picks up. Conditional forwarding after a set number of rings, at any hour. Your team gets first refusal on every call; the system catches what falls.
Good for: most businesses, most of the time. It is the setting we would suggest starting with. Watch: the ring count. Too few and the system grabs calls your team would have taken. Too many and the caller has given up. Four to five rings is usually about right.
Everything, always. Every call is answered by the system, with a transfer to a person when asked or needed.
Good for: high call volume, or a team that genuinely cannot get to the phone during service. Requires: the transfer path to work properly, because it is now the only route to a human.
Specific windows. The system covers your rush and your closed hours; your team covers the quiet middle of the day.
Good for: restaurants with a sharp service peak. Watch: complexity. A schedule nobody can remember is a schedule that will be wrong after your hours change.
The decision that actually matters
Not the schedule — the ring count, if you are using the "nobody picks up" setting.
This single number determines whether the arrangement feels like help or interference. Set it too low and your front desk reaches for a phone that has already been answered. Set it too high and the caller has hung up before the system gets there.
Time your own phone. Ring it and count the seconds per ring — usually around six. Four rings is roughly twenty-four seconds, which is about as long as anyone will wait for a business they are not already committed to.
Hours are not just opening hours
Three distinct things that people conflate, and a system should let you set them separately:
When you are open. What you tell the public.
When someone can actually answer the phone. Not the same. A two-person salon is open at eleven and both of them are with clients.
When a transfer to a person can succeed. Narrower still. There is no point attempting a transfer during a rush when nobody will pick up — the caller gets silence and then a fallback, which is a worse experience than being told straight away that everyone is busy.
Setting all three to your opening hours is the most common mistake, and it produces exactly the dead-air transfer that annoys callers most.
The exceptions that break it
Holidays. The one everybody forgets. A system that does not know you are closed on a public holiday will cheerfully take bookings for it, and you will find out when someone arrives.
The day someone is off. If the system offers appointments with a person who is not in, that is worse than offering nothing.
A late opening or early close. Stocktake, a private event, a staff meeting.
Whatever system you use, find out how exceptions are entered before you need one, and put next quarter's holidays in on day one. Setting business hours covers how it works on our side.
Reviewing it after a fortnight
Answering hours set once and never revisited are almost always wrong, because they were set on a guess about when calls arrive.
After two weeks, look at when calls actually came in and when they went unanswered. Most people discover the pattern is not what they assumed — commonly that the evening volume is higher than expected, and that a specific hour of the afternoon is much worse than the rest.
Then adjust. The schedule should follow your real call pattern, not your opening sign.
The setting to start with
If you want one recommendation: forward calls nobody answers after four rings, at any hour, and put your holidays in.
It changes nothing about how your team works, it covers both the after-hours calls and the mid-afternoon ones that ring out, and it gives you a fortnight of real data to set something better with. The codes by carrier are in the call forwarding guide.