How can I stop business calls after hours?

We often hear statements like:

“My partner asks why I have to take my mobile on holiday”

“How can I stop business calls after hours”

“How to Stop Clients from Invading Your After-Hours Time”

“I’m fed up with business calls after hours”

“How late is too late for customer calls”

There is also an old saying “There is rarely a technological solution to a behavioural problem”, except we do have a solution for this problem  – a couple actually….

The staff at big businesses often just go home at home time and can’t hear the phone ringing or emails pinging away, but for the start-up or small business owner or it can be a real problem.

There are 2 main threads to this blog, technology and behaviour, now I am not going to suggest how to run your business but I do have some tools that may help you along the way.

Behavior:

This is partly your behavior and partly your customers behavior (which often you have little or no control over), if you give your mobile/home number to people some of them will abuse it, I know it’s 10:30 pm on Friday night but…. sound familiar?

If you want or need to be available by phone 24×7 that is your choice, but if you do want to have a little time off, how do you stop the naughty customers from actually phoning you but still give the impression you are available?

If you have told your customers that out-of-hours response time is 4 hours then as long as you respond within 4 hours you are still meeting expectations and keeping them happy without being the guy whose phone rings in the middle of the cinema or anniversary meal, awkward!!!

Technology:

Here’s the clever bit, with modern technology you can be that much more flexible, firstly you can have a business phone number (even if you don’t have premises) that is different to your home/mobile number and you decide where those calls go and at what times.

It’s like a set of building blocks:

1. A common configuration is to have your business phone number forwarded to your mobile so you can still be contacted but no-one actually has your real mobile number. (also means you can change your phone/number without losing customers).
   
   
2. Front end that with Time-of-Day (ToD) routing, so between say Mon-Fri 9-5 the calls go to your mobile and outside those hours it goes to cloud voice mail which emails you the message so you can listen to it, action it or perhaps forward it to a colleague?
   
   
3. You can also enable missed call alerts, this is where they ring and hang up without leaving a voice mail, you still get an email then if its a really important customer you can call them back.
   
   
4. If you are a 1 or 2 man business and you go on holiday, you just point the number at your colleagues mobile and enjoy your hols, but you still keep your mobile on in case your colleague need to reach you for emergencies.
   
   
5. If you want some customers to be able to get you 24×7 then you can have a second business number that routes to your mobile 24×7 and only give this to your gold customers.
   
   
6. There are loads of other combinations of configuration to suit every requirement 🙂

What if my business grows?

As your business gets larger you keep the main business number (even if you move abroad) and you can send calls into your office where staff members can answer and deal with the calls.

At this point you might change your ToD so the calls go to the office in the day and VM at night? or maybe they go to the on-call engineers mobile if you are providing true 24×7 call out.

I want one of those, how do I get one?

At Voxcloud we provide all of the above and much much more, for more info please contact us or call our friendly team on 0333 002 0000.