After hours inquiries and when to answer them

For your trade 6 min read

What to do with the inquiry that lands at eleven at night, how to tell an emergency from a Tuesday job, and what your automatic reply should actually say.

It is ten past eleven. You are half asleep and the phone lights up on the nightstand with an inquiry from your website. Somebody wants a quote for a driveway.

You now have two bad options and you are too tired to pick. Answer, and you have started a working day that has not ended. Ignore it, and you lie there wondering whether it will be gone by morning.

Eleven at night is not an emergency by default

Almost every night inquiry is somebody who finally sat down.

They are not expecting you. They got the kids to bed, opened the laptop, dealt with three other things they had been putting off, and your form was one of them. In their head this is admin, filed at the time they had free. They are not waiting up for a reply and would probably be startled to get one.

So the first move is to stop treating the timestamp as a demand. Eleven at night tells you when they had a spare ten minutes. It does not tell you anything about urgency.

Two kinds of night inquiry

The difference is not subtle, which is good news for someone who is half asleep.

The first kind has water coming through a ceiling, a door that will not lock, no heat with a baby in the house, or a car that has to move by six. Those people call. They call twice. They do not fill out a form and wait, because forms are for people who can wait.

The second kind is everything else. Quotes, dates, a bathroom in the spring, a fence they have been meaning to sort. That arrives as a form or an email and it will still be there at seven.

If it came through the form, it is almost always the second kind. That single rule will let you put the phone down and go back to sleep, and it will be right nearly every time.

What your automatic reply should actually say

This is the piece of work that does the most for you, and it does it while you sleep.

An automatic reply is not a trick and customers are not fooled by it. It is a receipt. It tells the person their message arrived, which is the thing they are actually unsure about at eleven at night, and it tells them when a human will come back.

Keep it short and make it sound like you wrote it.

"Thanks, I have got your message. I am out on jobs during the day and I answer inquiries first thing in the morning and again about five. You will hear from me tomorrow. If it is urgent and water is involved, call me on the number below."

It confirms arrival, sets a time so nobody is refreshing an inbox, and gives a real emergency a route that is not the form.

Say your hours where people look

An automatic reply only reaches somebody who has already made contact. The hours on your website and on your Google listing reach everyone else, including the person deciding at eleven whether you are worth writing to at all.

Make them the hours you keep, not the ones you wish you kept. If you do not answer the phone after six, do not publish that you do, because the person who calls at ten past six and gets nothing has learned something about you that is not accurate and is not flattering.

If you take genuine emergencies out of hours, say that as a separate line, in words: emergency calls evenings and weekends, call rather than email. That is a different promise from being open, and customers read it correctly.

If you do take night calls, pick the rule before you are tired

The worst version of this is deciding at eleven, every time, on a case by case basis, while exhausted. You will be inconsistent, you will resent the ones you take, and you will worry about the ones you do not.

Decide once, when you are awake. Something like: I answer the phone until nine, I do not answer the form after six, and I do emergency calls for water and locks only, at a rate I have already worked out.

Write that rule down somewhere you can see it. Then the eleven o'clock decision is already made.

Whether an answering service is worth it

An answering service costs money, so the question is what it recovers.

It earns its keep when your trade gets urgent night calls, when your evenings currently ring out, and when a night call is worth real money to you. Emergency plumbing, locksmithing, some vehicle work, some property maintenance. There the calls exist and they convert, because the caller has no time to shop.

For most other trades it is buying an expensive answer to a question nobody is asking at night. A landscaper does not have night emergencies. Neither does a decorator. Before you sign anything, look at your call log for the last month and count the calls after eight that were not a family member. If the answer is one, you have your answer.

What to do at seven the next morning

Answer it first, before anything else.

The person who wrote at eleven has been thinking about it since. A reply waiting when they wake up looks like you were on it, costs you nothing extra, and puts you ahead of the two other businesses they also messaged, who will get to it after lunch.

Say something that shows you read it. Name the job, give a next step, give a time. Do not apologize for not answering at eleven. It was eleven at night, and nobody sensible expected otherwise.

A checklist for the night ones

• Decide your rule once, in daylight, and write it down
• Treat form inquiries as never urgent and phone calls as possibly urgent
• Write an automatic reply in your own words that confirms arrival and names a time
• Give emergencies a separate route, a phone number, said plainly
• Make the hours on your site and Google listing match the hours you keep
• Take the phone out of the bedroom on the nights you have decided not to work
• Answer overnight inquiries first thing, before the day swallows them
• Count last month's genuine night calls before paying anybody to take them

Questions people ask

Should I reply to an inquiry that comes in at eleven at night

Only if you want to, and mostly no. Send it in the morning and answer it first. An automatic reply covers the gap and tells them the message arrived, which is all they were worried about.

Will I lose the job by waiting until morning

For a quote or a planned job, rarely, as long as you are early and specific in the morning. For anything with water, locks or heat, the person will have rung somebody else already, and they will have rung rather than used the form.

What should my out of hours message say

That you have the message, when you answer inquiries, and what to do if it is a genuine emergency. Three sentences in your own voice beats a paragraph that sounds like a company.

Is it bad to have a website form if I only answer during the day

Not at all. The form is what lets somebody contact you at eleven without calling you at eleven. It is doing you a favor, as long as the reply tells them when to expect you.

Do I need to be available twenty four hours to compete

No, and pretending you are will hurt you more than saying you are not. Published hours you actually keep are worth more than a promise that breaks the first time somebody tests it.

What if the inquiry really is an emergency

They will call. If your voicemail greeting says when you pick up and what counts as an emergency to you, the genuine ones will follow that instruction and the rest will wait until morning.