As an employer, it can be difficult to juggle staff rotas, and there are certain times of year when it seems everyone wants to take time off. While you want to keep staff happy, you also need to ensure that basic functions such as phone cover don’t suffer in their absence, and it can be a real challenge to sort these things out. That’s why many businesses are now arranging phone cover at certain times of year. It means that your staff can enjoy their time off, but you can have peace of mind that the telephone is being covered and that important customers can still get through.
When are peak times?
Some times of year when you might need additional support include:
— The Christmas period
— Outside of school term-times
— Summer
— Easter
— Around bank holiday weekends
Although some businesses close down during these times, it’s usually expected that they’ll have some kind of phone cover for emergencies, and therefore it makes sense to use a service where their calls will be answered 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
Setting rotas
To ensure you have enough phone cover at all time it’s often a good idea to make rotas to allocate staff to telephone duties. Whether you have a dedicated call centre or a busy office, a rota will help you to identify whether you’ve got enough people answering the phones, and mean you can look at options such as using a holiday telephone service if you don’t have enough staff available, or anticipate a high call volume at certain times for example, when you’ve just placed an advert or have special offers on.
Call volumes
Working out the volume of calls coming in is essential when making sure you have enough phone cover. If you are running a call centre, then it’s easy to pull up statistics and to see when your busiest times are. Those who don’t have a call handling system can simply keep charts to see when the calls come in, and will soon be able to identify trends.
A friendly voice
While you may already have a voicemail system, these can sometimes be off-putting to potential clients, and having a person answering the phone has many advantages such as:
— Being able to take more details
— Reassuring clients that things will be dealt with
— Showing that your company cares
— Being able to deal with emergencies
If someone calls at a busy time when there are no staff available, or in the middle of the night, then a voicemail might not be dealt with straight away. You could then have to deal with an emergency or urgent situation, which could have been resolved quickly if your staff had known about it before. Having that human touch is why it’s worth using a telephone answering service.
When staff have time off, there’s no reason for business continuity to suffer, it just means you have to ensure the essentials are covered. By using a service to answer calls, you can free up staff to cover other things, and can ensure your company runs smoothly even during the holiday period.
