If you’re anything like us at SureVoIP®, you’re busy wrapping, buying things, making Festive plans, and getting your business ready for the holidays.
Christmas is a time for family, relaxing, and reviewing the year just gone. It is also a time of increased staff holidays, altered working hours, and working round office closures and public holidays.
One of the things you have to address is how to handle your phone system. What service will you be delivering to customers over the holiday season? How many staff members will you have, taking into account holidays? What service will your customers need? What service do your customers expect?
We can narrow this down into some key points to consider. Have a read through our checklist below and check if you have answers for all the points raised. If not, get in touch and we can offer some Festive advice!
Reduced Staff Count Over Holiday Period
Your usual call routing may be disrupted due to having fewer staff members working. As you have probably set up your call flow when fully staffed, this may need changed during a time of increased holidays. You may need a different person answering the phone, or a different approach to customer calls altogether during this time.
A VoIP service allows you to change your Call Routing quickly and easily. A SureVoIP® Technical Team member will happily change your Routing and Call Flow however suits. When the Holiday season is over, just give us a call or drop us an email, and we’ll change it back to your standard set up.
Another solution to the potential problems of a reduced staff count is to have employees working remotely. After all, if someone is tasked with overseeing your customer calls, do they really need to be in the office at all? Could this be done with a remote phone set up, working from home?
Various solutions are available. The person could take their standard work desk phone home. A VoIP service allows you to make and receive calls from anywhere you have a good internet connection. Your business phones do not necessarily need to be plugged in to your business internet connection. The employee can use the phone just as effectively using their home internet.
There are also various apps available when using a VoIP service. These allow workers to use their smart phone, tablet or desktop PC. This can replace the desk phone on a temporary or permanent basis, allowing the user a similar degree of functionality. The staff member in question does not then have to even stay in to answer calls! They can work from wherever they are. Visiting family, doing some last minute shopping, or making a snowman.
Unusual Opening Times
As your office has had to adjust to the Holidays, so your standard opening times may no longer be workable.
A SureVoIP® Fully Managed Hosted service allows you to set up Time of Day Routing, so you can route calls according to the time they are received. If your office has to shut early, we can send all calls to a designated answering service, for instance, or to a dedicated staff member. We can also send the calls straight to your voicemail.
There are a number of options available. It depends on your priorities and objectives.
You can use Voicemail to Email to keep track of messages received. Or you can forward all calls to a Staff Member. It depends on how you wish to work. A VoIP service will allow you the flexibility to adapt your phone system to your current requirements.
A possibility you may have overlooked is to use your phone system to pass on information. You can record a message to pass on changes to opening and closing times, and place this message as a voicemail recording, or as part of your company’s main ‘switchboard’ message.
Make it Christmassy!
Let’s not forget – it is Christmas after all!
We offer our customers lots of ways to customise their phone system. As you can guess, at this time of year, some people really get into the spirit!
You can have Santa himself boom out a message in his best Santa voice for all your customers to hear when they call in. You can have any message you want recorded in a studio by Santa himself (we won’t fob you off with an elf doing the voice).
Or you can record your very own staff singing carols! It is up to you.
If you would like to discuss how we can help over the Festive period, just get in touch.
NB – We will be closed on 24th, 25th and 26th, and the 31st, 1st and 2nd.
Enjoy the Holidays! Happy Christmas from all at SureVoIP®