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.
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!!!
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.
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.
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.
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