At the beginning and end of each day, some businesses have a designated person – or even several – who manually switch the call forwarding capabilities on or off: In the morning, it’s time to switch the phones away from the answering service and back to the in-house personnel. At the end of the day, or on weekends, it’s time to forward back over to the answering service.
Sounds simple, right?
It can be simple…except when human error, forgetfulness or unforeseen emergencies or disasters – which are all inevitable – come into play. Say that the designated “switcher” forgets to forward the call to the answering service at the end of business day. Or, what if that person has a family emergency and needs to come in the office late one day? You will likely miss important calls. Of course, as well, there is always a chance of Mother Nature affecting business with a big storm or other natural disaster that may affect your business operations for a day or more.
Unless you have some disaster answering service contingency plan in place (in combination with your call forwarding) and unless your call forwarding is off “manual,” you may be completely cut off from incoming calls for an unknown period of time.
Missed Calls Mean Missed Business
In each of these very real potential scenarios, call forwarding will not be switched over at the right time. As a result, important calls from customers and clients, as well as calls from prospects who are interested in becoming your customer or client, could be missed. Missed calls mean missed business, and this is never a good thing, regardless of the size or nature of your business.
When you have call forwarding set up to switch over automatically (“Call Forwarding No Answer”) after a certain number of rings, all of these potential problems are no longer threats to your business. In addition, automatic call forwarding means all of the following for your customers and callers:
- No more endless voicemail loops
- No more worrying that the phone won’t be answered if a specific someone is on vacation or out of the office
- No more missing after-hours or weekend calls – your phones are on 24/7/365
- No more having to physically be in the office to get your calls – they can be forwarded to whatever number you designate, whether you are at home, on the road or even on vacation.
It’s important to remember that call forwarding is done at the carrier level, and your specific forwarding instructions will vary by carrier. And while there are several different types of call forwarding, we recommend Call Forwarding Busy or Call Forwarding No Answer.
