I look at my Rover request site very often, especially before I go to bed- 11-12 Midnight. Yet the next day, a request will come in and the request will say "yesterday"- when I already looked at the sight.
So, my suggestion would be to add the time, to the website, when a request to sit a dog comes in.
I don't have a cell phone with internet. I use my computer. Otherwise, I would be on it all the time and not giving my guest dogs the attention I promise my customers. I am a host in my home. That said, I set time perimeters with my customers. I am an early a.m. person and have taken drop offs at 5:30 a.m. My "very latest pick up" is 7p.m. because my whole household goes to bed as early as 8pm. I check my rover mail as the dogs are eating breakfast. I then check my google email. If a potential new customer sent a request, I wait for a decent hour to call and talk to them. I prefer speaking personally with a potential customer, whether I am booked for their dates or have availability.
I check my rover emails frequently through out the day but if I have more that 2 guest dogs, it may take a couple hours between checking it. I promise their fur babies will get lots of attention (individual and as a pack) and I sometimes take them for nice long walks. Also, I like to take pictures of them while I am interacting with them. It takes time for me to download the pictures into 2 photo programs and then send them with an update to the owners.
I am set up for rover to send customer emails to my google inbox also. But, I have noticed it can take up to 30 minutes for it to arrive in my google inbox. Once, I called a person with a request and spoke with him for awhile. I was booked for his dates but wanted to find out if I would be a good fit for the next time he needed pet sitting. He really wanted someone who sits one dog at a time, so that wouldn't work. After I gave him the rover customer service phone number and gave him suggestions of information and questions to ask/tell customer service, I forgot to "archive" him until an hour or so later. I don't know how that would affect me but he was going to talk to customer service right away as his dates were close.
If rover does set up "hours", I hope they let us set up the a.m. to p.m. time.
Rover doesn't count overnight hours against you. I'm not positive what hours they consider overnight (that would be a good question for the support team), but generally a request that comes in late at night won't hurt your average response time if you reply in the morning. If you have push notifications to your email/phone, which I highly recommend, then you'll have a time stamp from those so you know within a few minutes when the request hit your Rover inbox. You can also set quiet hours for your phone so Rover won't send notifications overnight.
I've set my quiet hours to be from 10 pm to 8-9 am and I've never been marked down or criticized for that. I need my sleep :-)
My response time has actually dropped recently because I switched my schedule at my other job. Now I'm on a night shift rotation and sleep later, even on my days off.. I get late night messages no problem, but the ones that get sent in the morning end up taking longer to reply to.
How do I set quiet hours? I'm having trouble finding it on the website and in the app.
If you want to suggest this to the Rover support team, I'd recommend you email them: support@rover.com.