Call and text contacts in their own timezone

Want your calls and texts to land at a reasonable local hour for every contact? Here's how to set the timezone your campaign's daily hours run on, and how to switch to per-contact timing for a list that spans the country. It's for campaign managers setting up calling and texting campaigns.

Why use timezone-based outreach

Your account has one timezone. Your contacts often don't. If your account sits in New York and your list includes California, a 9 AM start means a 6 AM phone call for a third of your contacts, and you'll never know it happened. You'll just see poor numbers.

Setting the timezone correctly changes what you get out of the same list:

• Higher pickup and response rates. Reaching people during their evening or lunch hour, rather than before they're awake, means more conversations from the same number of dials.
• Fewer wasted credits and agent hours. Calls placed at the wrong local hour still cost you credits and still occupy an agent. Timing the list properly gets more completed conversations out of the same spend.
• Less damage to your brand. A 6 AM political call doesn't just go unanswered. It generates complaints, opt-outs, and spam reports that follow your Caller ID into future campaigns.
• Calling hours you can defend. Under TCPA guidance, outreach runs between 8 AM and 9 PM in the contact's local time, not yours. These settings are how you hold a national list inside that window without splitting it into regional campaigns.
• A national list you can run as one campaign. Instead of building separate campaigns per region with staggered hours, you run one campaign and let CallHub stagger the timing for you.
• Agents who know when to come back. When per-contact timing is on and there's nobody callable at this moment, agents get told when contacts become available instead of sitting on an empty queue.

What you can expect once it's set: your campaign starts dialing and texting a contact only when the clock in that contact's location falls inside your operating hours, and stops when it passes them. Contacts in later timezones simply get picked up later in the day.

Choose the right setting for your list

The two settings do different jobs, and you use one or the other, never both.

Set one timezone for the whole campaign

Use this when your contacts share a region. Your daily start and stop times are calculated in the timezone you pick, and every contact is treated the same way.

1. In the campaign's schedule step, set your START and FINISH dates and your daily operational hours.
2. Open the Campaign's Timezone dropdown.

3. Select the timezone your contacts live in.

   

4. Finish creating the campaign as usual.

⚠ WARNING: This setting applies one clock to your whole list. It does not check each contact's local time. If you set Eastern hours of 8 AM to 9 PM and your list includes West Coast contacts, those contacts get dialed at 8 AM Eastern, which is 5 AM where they are, three hours before the TCPA window opens for them. Use Call people in their timezone for any list that crosses timezones.

Reach each contact in their own timezone

Use this for a US list that crosses timezones. CallHub works out each contact's timezone and applies your operating hours in their local time.

1. In the campaign's schedule step, set your daily operational hours.
2. Select Call people in their timezone. In a Text Broadcast, the same option reads Text people in their timezone.

3. Finish creating the campaign as usual.
    

   

Every contact gets the same window, measured on their own clock. Say your operating hours are 10 AM to 6 PM. A contact in New York becomes reachable at 10 AM Eastern and stops being reachable at 6 PM Eastern. A contact in California becomes reachable at 10 AM Pacific, the same moment as 1 PM Eastern, and stops at 6 PM Pacific. The campaign works its way west as the day goes on, so your Pacific contacts are still being reached after your Eastern ones are finished.

How CallHub works out a contact's timezone

CallHub checks three things, in this order, and uses the first one it finds:

1. The zipcode in the contact's address.
2. The state in the contact's address, if there's no zipcode.
3. The area code of the contact's phone number, if there's no state either.

Zipcode and state are read from the contact's record in your contact list, so this only works as well as the data you imported. Zipcode is the most precise: several US states sit across two timezones, and one state doesn't observe daylight saving, so a state name alone can't always settle the question.

What your agents see

In campaigns agents work, per-contact timing changes the agent console in one visible way. If an agent opens the campaign at a moment when no contact's local clock falls inside your operating hours, they see a message telling them when to come back, and which timezone that time is in. They aren't left guessing whether the time refers to their own clock or yours.

Notes & limits

⚠ WARNING: Calling-hours rules apply in the contact's local time, not your account's. Getting this wrong means calls landing outside permitted hours in another timezone, which creates compliance exposure and complaints. Confirm your timezone setting before you start the campaign, not after.

⚠ WARNING: Per-contact timing is only as good as your address data. If a contact has no zipcode and no state, CallHub falls back to their area code, which can point at a timezone they left years ago. Check that your list carries complete addresses before you rely on this setting for compliance.

ⓘ NOTE: Call people in their timezone is available for US contacts only. 

✓ TIP: Include a zipcode column when you import contacts, and a state column as a backup. Area codes are the weakest signal, because people keep their mobile number when they move.

FAQs

My agents see "No people to call now, try again later" even though contacts are pending. Why? 
With per-contact timing on, a contact is only callable when their own local clock is inside your operating hours, so pending contacts in other timezones aren't available yet. CallHub prepares contacts from each timezone in your list so agents have someone to call throughout the day. The message includes when to come back.

If my campaign timezone is already inside legal hours, are contacts in other timezones covered? 
No. The campaign's hours are checked against the timezone you picked, not against each contact's location. Eastern hours of 8 AM to 9 PM are inside the window in New York and outside it in California for the first three hours of the day. Per-contact timing is the setting that closes that gap.

Can I use per-contact timing for contacts outside the US? 
No. It's restricted to US contacts. For international lists, set the Campaign's Timezone to match your audience's region.

Does this apply to texting as well as calling? 
Yes. Both settings control when the campaign sends, so your texting campaign follows the same hours in the same timezone. The option is worded Text people in their timezone there.