The questions that arrive when you're closed.
Evenings and weekends are when people decide. By the time you open, a good number of them have decided without you.
Look at when your messages actually arrive. Not the ones you answer. All of them.
For most small businesses there is a lump in the evening, and another one on Sunday afternoon. People sort out their lives when they are not at work. That is when they think about the leaking tap.
Which means a good share of your enquiries arrive when there is nobody there.
The decision happens before you open
Here is the bit that costs money. People rarely wait.
At nine at night someone decides to sort this out. They message you. They also message two others, because that is what people do now. Whoever answers first is in front.
You reply at eight the next morning, which by your standards is quick. By then the decision may already be made.
A note about the numbers you will see
Search this subject and you will be told that a missed call costs exactly $1,200, that 27% of calls go unanswered, that 85% of people never leave a voicemail.
We went looking for where those came from. We could not find a source for any of them. They get repeated between company blogs, and each time they sound more official.
So we are not going to use them. Work it out from your own numbers instead — it takes ten minutes and it will be true.
What is actually being asked at night
Go and read your last twenty evening messages. Almost none of them need you.
Do you cover my area. How much roughly. How soon could you come. Do you do this particular thing.
Those are facts. You have known all of them for years. They are just not written anywhere a person can reach at nine at night.
Your options, honestly
Do nothing and answer in the morning. Free. Genuinely right for some businesses, especially if you are fully booked. You lose some work you did not need.
Set expectations. Free. "We reply by 9am" turns silence into a promise. Costs nothing and helps more than people expect.
Publish the answers. Free, one afternoon. Handles the four questions above for anyone who reads.
Pay a person. An answering service. Real money, and genuinely better than software for anything sensitive or complicated.
Let something answer from what you wrote. Works for the repeated factual questions. Useless for anything needing judgement.
Most people should try the two free ones first. If the evening messages stop, you are done, and you spent nothing.
One thing we cannot do
Since this is a piece about after hours, we should be clear. hailera does not answer your phone. We do not do voice at all.
What we do is answer the written questions from what you published, so fewer of them need to become a call in the first place. If your problem is specifically a ringing phone, an answering service is the honest recommendation, and there are good ones.
Written by the team at hailera — we help small businesses answer customer questions without being there.