Out of hours telephone answering: Maximising your customer journey

It wasn’t long ago that shops closed at 7pm and there were laws that said shops could only be open 5½ days a week.

If you hadn’t got your bread and milk in time – tough, you had to wait until the morning.

Today however, you can go to the supermarket at 3 am in the morning and buy a pain au chocolat, a wonder mop, and anything else your heart desires.

You could even stop at fast food place on the way home and be instantly served a hot meal.

What I’m trying to get at is – things have changed.

People are used to getting what they want at a time convenient to them, and things are going the same way in business.

Fortunately, thanks to outsourcing it’s easy to make the transition to providing a 24/7 service.

Let’s take a look at how out of hours call handling can help your business.

Why after hours telephone answering services matter

You might be thinking “yes, yes, it’s all well and good having supermarkets open 24/7, but no one really wants to talk to my little business after 5pm”.

However, if you have a website and you look at your google analytics data, you’ll probably see that plenty of people visit your site late into the evening.

This is important because your website is your digital storefront.

If people are looking at your website there’s a good chance they’ll want to buy.

If they want to buy, they might have questions to ask you before they make their purchase. If you’re unable to answer those questions because there’s no one answering your phone, you risk losing that customer to a competitor who is available.

Thanks to the internet, it’s vital you provide out of hours telephone answering to support your customers shopping online.

But what’s the easiest way to go about it?

How to do out of hours telephone answering in house

One way to provide out of hours call handling is to do it yourself.  After all, unless you’ve got an international audience it’s unlikely anyone’s actually going to phone you at 3 o’clock in the morning.

In all likelihood any out of hours enquiries will come between 5pm and 11pm, so it wouldn’t disrupt your sleep too much to answer them.

The problem is though, if you want to go out in the evening you would still be unable to take that call. And, even if you did take the call on your mobile, without access to your stock management system and your CRM you wouldn’t be able to do much.

You could ask other staff members to help by going on call, but that is a significant outgoing that you might not see a good return on.

Fortunately, there is an alternative when it comes to providing out of hours call answering.

Outsource your out of hours call handling

There are a number of companies that you can outsource your calls to that will help keep your phone lines covered 24/7.

All you have to do is set up a call divert and your out of hours calls will be redirected into a 24 hour outsourced contact centre where they will be answered by a team of friendly and professional PAs.

When you outsource out of hours phone answering, you allow yourself to relax in the evenings without having to worry about answering calls and you can make considerable savings compared to paying staff to go on call.

It is a cost effective solution that will keep your phone lines covered, and will make sure that you don’t lose business because of missed calls.

Find out more

If you want to know more about out of hours telephone answering you can visit our telephone answering page.

If you have any enquiries or questions you’d like to ask us please don’t hesitate to get in touch – our phone lines are open 24 hours.

Want to read more? Check out our blog on remote telephone answering services.