Schedule call routing is a useful service that will prohibit calls from going to places such as hunt groups and call centers when there is predictably nobody staffing them. With scheduled call routing you can avoid those after hours calls heading to an empty group. Within the service you should know where you want the calls to go if they’re not going to the business hours service.
When to Schedule
The obvious time to set a schedule is to cover your business hours, or more properly, the times when your business is closed. This is usually a morning schedule, an evening schedule, and a weekend schedule, set up to divert calls away to a voicemail or auto attendant when the office is closed. This schedule can be set up immediately and applied to the hunt group or other service that takes the inbound calls first.
Holidays
For holidays, you can set a separate schedule that will send the calls to a voicemail or auto attendant, with a message describing your observance of the holiday and when normal business will resume. When you put these in place, you may want to set the priority of the scheduled call routing to favor the holiday schedule over the normal business hours schedule, that way it will announce the holiday even if the call comes in at a time that would be normally off hours.
Early Outs
If you decide to close early for a day, you can easily add a new scheduled event for that day. If you simply have it follow the same path as a regular out of business call, then customers may be confused hearing your business hours and realizing that they are calling during that time, so another message may be appropriate.
Weekend Special
For weekends, remember to use your full day event option, which generally works better than scheduling from midnight to midnight.
When using your scheduled call routing feature, a little bit of planning can make after hours, holiday, and weekend calls much smoother for your potential customers, and establish a professional polish to your business – even when you aren’t there.