Why nights and weekends matter
One analysis looked at prospect inquiries sent to 1,524 franchisors over 12 months ending August 2018. It found that 67% arrived outside 9 to 5, Monday to Friday, local time. In a 2016 UK test of 85 law firms, one in 20 firms had no answerphone for out-of-hours calls, so those calls were lost.
The franchise data came from six lead sites owned by the author's parent company, and it is about franchise buyers. Your mix will differ. Step 1 shows you how to count your own.
Step 1: count your after-hours inquiries
Take 15 minutes
- Export the last 90 days of form fills, emails, chats and missed calls with their timestamps
- Mark each one inside or outside your working hours, in the sender's time zone
- Count them. The share outside working hours is your number
Step 2: sort what happens after hours
Answer right away
- New inquiries: what you do, who it is for, how it works
- Booking, confirming and rescheduling meetings
- Where things stand on a request, if you have the information
- Basic questions from clients that your notes already answer
Take details and hand off in the morning
- Pricing and scope questions
- Contract and billing changes
- Complaints that are not urgent
- Anything that needs a decision from you
Escalate to a person now
- A client's live campaign is overspending or broken
- A client's ad account is suspended or disapproved
- A security or data problem
- A client says they are leaving, or a legal or press contact
Step 3: write the escalation list
Put it in one page that anyone can follow at midnight.
For each urgent case, write down
- Who gets the first call, and their number
- How long to wait before trying the backup, such as 10 minutes
- Who the backup is, and a second backup
- What the caller is told while they wait
- Where the notes go so the morning team can pick it up
Review it each quarter
- Check that the numbers still work
- Call the list once as a drill
What a good after-hours reply contains
We found no study that measures what people expect when they reach a business at night. McKinsey's 2017 survey of more than 1,000 B2B buyers found slow response was the biggest frustration, so the safe rule is to reply fast and say what happens next.
Every reply should
- Come right away, from a person or a clearly labeled assistant
- Say plainly what happens next and when, such as 'a teammate will call you at 8:30 a.m.'
- Collect the details once, so the caller never repeats them
- Arrive by text or email too, so they have it in writing
Voicemail greeting
- Thanks for calling [Company]. We are out of the office right now. Leave your name, number and a short message, and we will call you back by [time] on [next business day]. If this is an urgent problem with a live client account, press 1.
After-hours auto-reply email
- Subject: We got your message
- Hi [First name], thanks for writing. Our team is offline until [time]. Here is what happens next: [first step]. If it is urgent, call [number].
The pin-it-up checklist
Check every box
- We know what share of inquiries arrive after hours
- Every channel is covered: phone, email, text and chat
- New inquiries get an answer in minutes, not the next morning
- A list says what is answered, what waits, and what is escalated
- Every urgent case has a first contact and a backup
- Callers are told what happens next and when
- Notes from every after-hours contact are waiting for the team at 8 a.m.
- We tested the whole path last quarter
Scouq covers calls, email, text and chat around the clock, hands people who are ready to your team with notes. You decide what counts as urgent before anything goes live.
Sources
- How To Improve Prospect Contact Rates: Get in the (Time) Zone! (Michael Alston, Franchising.com, December 2018)
- 'Mystery shopping' exercise finds firms do not follow up enquiries (Legal Futures, May 2016, on a Shoppers Anonymous report)
- When B2B buyers want to go digital, and when they don't (McKinsey, Angevine, Plotkin and Stanley, 2017)
