What happens to messages that arrive when the business is closed?

The 126 hours nobody covers

The arithmetic is simple and almost nobody does it. A week has 168 hours. The legal maximum work week in Colombia is 42 hours as of 15 July 2026. One person on shift covers those 42; the other 126 are covered by nobody.

They are not dead hours: they are the nights, the weekends and the holidays, which is when a lot of people deal with their personal errands. The message comes in anyway, sits unread, and the next morning competes with everything that arrived since.

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What is known about answering first

There are two studies worth citing, and it is best not to mix them because they measure different things.

The first is an audit published in Harvard Business Review in March 2011 by Oldroyd, McElheran and Elkington, covering 2,241 companies in the United States. They measured how long those companies took to respond to a contact that had come in through their website: the average was 42 hours, and 23% of the companies never responded at all.

The second is earlier, and it is the one that measures the effect of timing: James Oldroyd, at MIT Sloan together with InsideSales.com, analyzed more than 15,000 contacts across six companies and found that attempting contact within the first 5 minutes, compared with waiting 30, multiplies the odds of qualifying the lead by 21.

Both are about business-to-business sales in the United States, and they cannot be transplanted as-is to a clinic in Bogotá. What does transfer is the direction: the window in which someone is still interested is measured in minutes, not days.

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What an agent does during those hours

It answers. Not with a "thanks for your message, we will get back to you", but with the information the business loaded: what services exist, what they cost, what hours are kept, what the customer needs to bring. If a calendar is connected, it leaves the appointment booked.

Whatever it cannot resolve, it leaves prepared. It takes the details, organizes them the way the business asked, and first thing in the morning the team finds a case with context instead of an eleven-at-night "hi, info".

What covering those hours costs

Hiring somebody for the night shift costs the same as for the day shift: in Colombia, a minimum-wage employee costs the company 2,715,490 pesos a month including benefits, social security and payroll taxes, and covers 42 hours a week.

The 397 USD a month Vyrkon plan includes 15,000 credits and covers all 168 hours. The honest comparison is not "it replaces a person" —it does not, and there are things only somebody on the team can resolve— but that the hours nobody covers today have a price, and that price is low.

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