Calls arrive when your office is closed: after five, on weekends, over the Christmas shutdown. Your phone system can handle those calls in several different ways, and choosing deliberately beats letting them ring out. Here are the practical options and what each is good for.
The caller leaves a message and it arrives in a mailbox as an email, usually with the recording attached and often with an automatic text version of what was said. This is the most popular choice because nobody has to remember to dial in and check anything, and the message can be forwarded to whoever should deal with it. It can go to one person or to a shared mailbox that several people watch.
Calls ring a mobile instead of the office. Useful for trades, on-call staff and any business where a missed call is a lost job. It can be set to apply only outside your hours, only when nobody answers the office phone, or both, and it can rotate between people if you run a roster. Worth thinking about before you turn it on: whoever holds the diversion is genuinely on call, so agree who and when.
Your phone system can play one greeting during your opening hours and a different one outside them, on a schedule you set. The after-hours message is the place to say when you open, give an email address, and point people at anything urgent. A caller who hears your real hours and a way to reach you is far happier than one who hears a generic beep.
A separate message for public holidays and shutdown periods, switched on for the dates you nominate and switched off again automatically. This is the one most businesses forget until the day before Christmas. It is worth setting the dates in advance, including Victorian public holidays, so nobody has to remember.
Most businesses end up with a mix: after-hours greeting, then voicemail to email, with a diversion to a mobile for one particular number or one particular caller path. That is normal and it is all configurable.
These are settings on your own phone system, so they can be changed whenever you want. Log a ticket telling us what you want callers to hear and where you want calls to go, and we will set it up and test it with you. Useful things to include:
If you record your own greeting, do it in a quiet room, keep it under about twenty seconds, and say the business name first. If you would rather have a professionally recorded greeting, we can arrange that and quote it in writing.
Everything on this page is about your business's own phone arrangements. Setting up an after-hours message or a diversion does not mean anyone is answering calls on your behalf outside your hours, and it does not change our support hours. YouGrowIT support is available Monday to Friday, 8:30am to 5:30pm Melbourne time, excluding Victorian public holidays. Work outside those hours is available as an add-on or on a pay-as-you-go basis, priced openly and agreed before it starts.
So plan the change during business hours. Asking on the Friday before a shutdown is usually fine. Asking at 6pm on Christmas Eve is not.
Log a ticket at portal.yougrowit.com.au or email support@yougrowit.com.au. If it is stopping you working right now, call 03 9028 4358.
Support hours are Monday to Friday, 8:30am to 5:30pm Melbourne time, excluding Victorian public holidays.