Out-of-hours calls: how a small trade can handle them

Decide what you actually want

Before thinking about phones, decide what you want out-of-hours to be. There are three honest positions, and each is fine.

• You do emergency work. You want every night call, quickly, because that is where your margin is. Locksmiths, recovery firms and drainage engineers are often here.
• You do it sometimes. You will go out for the right job or a good customer, but you don't want to be woken for a dripping tap.
• You don't do it. Evenings are your own. But you still want tomorrow's work that rings tonight.

Most problems with out-of-hours calls come from not having chosen. You answer some and ignore others, customers don't know what to expect, and you feel guilty about the phone on the bedside table.

Most evening calls are not emergencies

It is easy to assume that anyone ringing at eight in the evening has an emergency. In practice many are people who have just got home from work and are finally dealing with the thing that has been annoying them all week. They want to book you, not summon you.

Those calls are worth having and need nothing more than a proper answer and a call back in the morning. If they reach a dead phone or a full voicemail box, they ring someone else, and you lose an ordinary daytime job that happened to ring at night.

Your options

• Answer everything yourself. It costs nothing and catches every job. It also costs you your evenings, and you cannot answer while you are on another call-out.
• Voicemail with a clear greeting. Say what counts as an emergency, what to do if it is one, and when you will ring back otherwise. Better than a default greeting, but many urgent callers still hang up.
• A rota with another firm. Two or three trades cover each other's nights. It works well when you trust each other and badly when you don't.
• A telephone answering service. People take a message and can ring you for an urgent one. Check their hours and what they charge at night.
• An AI receptionist. Answers every call at any hour, takes the details, marks what is urgent and can try your mobile for a caller who cannot wait.

Sorting urgent from not urgent

Whoever or whatever answers at night needs a simple rule for when to wake you. Keep it to things a stranger can judge from the caller's own words.

• Is anyone at risk: locked out in the cold, no heating with a baby in the house, a child locked in?
• Is damage getting worse by the hour: water running, a roof open to the rain?
• Is a business unable to trade?
• Has the caller said they cannot wait until morning?

Everything else can be a message for the morning. With a Kallorix receptionist you can switch on urgent calls: she tries your mobile once when a caller has an emergency or asks to speak to someone now, and takes a message if you don't pick up. Every call, urgent or not, arrives as a text with how soon they need you.

Be clear about what you charge

If you do go out at night, have a call-out charge and state it. Customers expect to pay more out of hours, and they would rather hear the figure before you set off than argue about it afterwards. A fixed charge that is said plainly on the phone also filters out the callers who were never going to pay it.

If the price depends on the job, say what the call-out covers and that the rest depends on what you find. What loses customers is not the price. It is the surprise.

Safety comes before the job

Some night calls are not jobs for a tradesperson at all, at least not first. A smell of gas, a fire, someone in danger or a vehicle in a live lane needs the emergency services. Anyone answering your phone should know to say so straight away and not carry on taking a booking.

Nobody answering on your behalf should give repair or safety instructions either. They cannot see what the caller is looking at. The right response is to take the details and get you on the phone.

Look after yourself

A phone that might ring at any hour is tiring even on the nights it doesn't. If you take emergency work, decide which nights, and let something else take the calls on the others. Customers do not need you personally at three in the morning. They need to know that someone has taken their details and that a named person will ring them at a time you have told them.

That is the real job of out-of-hours cover: not to make you available all the time, but to make sure no call goes unanswered while you are not.