Preparing for holidays at your business doesn’t have to be a chore. With a few quick updates, you can change your holiday business hours and other essential phone system settings before your team takes a well-deserved break.
These 5 last-minute phone system updates are essential for any business. Let your customers know about abbreviated hours, changes in staffing, and any promotions you may be running.
1. Update Holiday Business Hours
Set your Holiday Hours in the VirtualPBX Phone System with a quick login and a couple number entries. This takes only five minutes but informs how the rest of your phone system acts.
Business hours let other tools like your Auto Attendant know when to route callers to individual employees, phones that ring whole departments, and individual or group voicemail boxes if necessary. Setting these hours is an essential first step for keeping your phone system synchronized with your ongoing business activities. Make sure these are up to date whether you’re on holiday or back to a normal operating schedule.
2. Adjust Auto Attendant(s)
Your Auto Attendant benefits most from the proper setting of holiday hours. Every Auto Attendant at your company works as an inbound call filter that makes sure employees and departments are sent calls they should take.
Our Holiday Hours feature lets you select when calls are routed; Auto Attendant chooses how and to whom they are routed.
Within the Auto Attendant, you may want to update your greeting to announce your seasonal hours. You should also make sure that your routing settings – pressing one for sales and two for customer support, for instance – are correct for the season. You might want to include or omit a specific department from your routing selections to match your team’s availability.
Make sure to adjust your Multiple Auto Attendants for any of the phone numbers on your account that might be affected by any end-of-year changes.
3. Brighten Voicemail Greetings
Both your auto attendants and your Voicemail boxes may need a refresh.
As a business owner, you may want to update your attendants yourself. You can urge employees to update their voicemail greetings with some holiday cheer and help them make quick work with a tutorial about creating greetings from our blog.
Holiday greetings wording doesn’t have to be difficult. Keep things simple by announcing your expected work hours and when you will be out of the office. Follow our tutorials to keep your greetings short, positive, and informative.
4. Change On-Hold Greetings
When using the VirtualPBX ACD Queues Pro feature, you can create unique hold treatments for customers that are waiting in a queue. It’s easy to insert audio clips into those settings so customers can hear about your latest holiday deals.
You can take advantage of our Snap Recordings Promotion and download several free, professional recordings to use as hold messages and voicemail messages. Then take 20% off your next order from Snap to prepare for the coming year.
On-hold greetings follow the same type of format your auto attendant and voicemail greetings should follow. Keep your messages brief so you can hold your customers’ attention.
5. Forward Your Calls
Our Call Forwarding feature also works well with changing holiday hours.
Your system users can set their own forwarding preferences by entering their user portal. They simply enter their phone number where they wish to receive calls.
All calls directed to their VirtualPBX system extension will ring their chosen number. Most often, we find that our customers use personal mobile phone numbers when choosing to forward calls.
It isn’t always easy during the holidays to be near an office phone. With Call Forwarding and a personal smartphone, employees on-call can be reached no matter their location, and their personal voicemail boxes will always work as a backup in case they don’t pick up.
Preparing for the Holidays
Preparing for the holidays, even if you’re doing it at the last minute, usually only takes a few quick system updates.
Still, your customers will gain an improved experience with your company when they know at which hours you will be working. They will also appreciate the consistency of experience you provide by routing them to the appropriate contacts and being forthright with your holiday messages.
Take a quick audit of your holiday status today, and take a few minutes to adjust your holiday business hours and messages.
