Ring a handful of small businesses at 6pm on a weekday and see what happens. A few will play a short message saying they’re closed and when they’ll be back. A few will just ring out until the line gives up. And a surprising number will play a greeting that still mentions a public holiday from three months ago.
The caller doesn’t read any of that as a scheduling slip. They read it as a business that can’t be bothered, and they ring the next one on the list.
December makes this worse. The team leaves on the 23rd, the phone stays set to normal opening hours, and for two or three weeks every call goes nowhere. If you’ve paid for Google ads or put months into your business listing, that’s where the money quietly drains out.
What a caller needs to hear
Someone who reaches your after-hours message wants three answers, fast. Are you closed, or just busy on another line? When will somebody call them back? And is there anything they can do in the meantime, like leave a message, fill in a form or ring an emergency number?
Something like this does the job: “Thanks for calling Harbour Plumbing. We’re closed until 8am Monday. Leave your name and number and we’ll call you first thing. If it’s a burst pipe or you’ve got no hot water, ring 0400 000 000.” (Harbour Plumbing is made up, so swap in your own details.)
That’s about ten seconds. It answers everything. Skip the menu of options, because nobody wants to press 3 at 8pm to hear your office hours.
The everyday setup
Get the ordinary week right before you think about holidays.
Make the phone change itself. If somebody has to flick it to night mode every afternoon and back again every morning, it’ll fail on the first day that person is off sick. Time-based routing handles this on its own: calls ring the team during opening hours and go to your after-hours message outside them.
Record your own greeting. The default robot voice tells callers nothing about your business, and a clear human recording sounds like someone is actually running the place.
Send voicemails to email, and send them to a shared inbox rather than one person’s. Messages that land in an inbox get returned. Messages that sit on a handset until Monday get returned after the customer has already booked someone else.
And put lunch breaks and early Friday
finishes in the schedule too. It takes five minutes, and it stops a small, regular leak of missed calls that you’d never otherwise notice.
Holidays are where it goes wrong
Christmas Day and Boxing Day are easy to remember. The days around them are harder, and so are the public holidays that change from state to state. Melbourne Cup Day is a public holiday in Melbourne and an ordinary working Tuesday almost everywhere else, so a business with offices in both has two different answers to “are you open?”
Before you close, do these:
- Set the closure dates and the special greeting in advance, from your desk, not from your phone on the beach.
- Say the actual return date. “We’re back on Monday 12 January” beats “we’re closed for the holidays” every time.
- Give an urgent contact, or say plainly that there isn’t one, so people can plan around it.
- Ring your own number from your mobile once it’s set up. You’ll hear what customers hear, and it takes two minutes.
- Put a reminder in your calendar for your first day back. A “we’re closed” message that’s still playing in the second week of January is as bad as no message at all.
If you can’t really close
Plenty of businesses don’t get to switch off. Trades, property managers, transport and health services all get calls on public holidays that matter.
For those, the aim is “covered” rather than “closed”. Calls ring whoever is on duty that day, and if they don’t pick up, the call moves to the next person instead of dying in voicemail. The on-call person answers through an app on their own phone, so the customer sees the business number and not a personal mobile.
What matters is where the roster lives. If it’s in the phone system, it works. If it’s in someone’s head or a group chat, it works until the day it doesn’t.
Mistakes that keep turning up
Last year’s greeting with last year’s dates still in it. The main line forwarded to one person’s mobile, which is fine until that person is driving or on another call. A second number, maybe an old 1300 line, that nobody remembered to update. And the one I’d put at the top: nobody ever tests it.
How this works on Yabbit
On a cloud phone system like Yabbit, hours, closures and on-call rosters sit in one place, and you can change them from a browser in a few minutes. No one has to touch a handset or ring a technician to swap a greeting. If your current setup depends on one person who happens to be on leave, that’s worth sorting out before the Christmas rush, not during it.
If you only do one thing this week, ring your own business number from your mobile after hours and listen to what comes back.