Startup Life: Working on a Holiday

As small business owners or entrepreneurs, we often find ourselves working long hours and through the weekends. As holiday season is upon us, you have a big decision to make in balancing family time and work time. Unless you are a holiday-focused business, the chances are your business will be slower than normal on these day but you’ve promised your customers that your support team will be available 24/7. So, what’s a good option that allows you to spend time at home without missing out on any inbound calls from very few customers that are actually (probably not by choice) working on these days? VoIP (duh)!

Most Voice over IP carriers are called “nomadic” carriers in the eyes of the FCC. This is because we allow VoIP customers to use any Internet connectivity for your phone service. This is drastically different from the analog carriers that are required to have full control of the physical wire down to the last foot to your office doorstep. What does this all mean to you?

This means, you and your employees can simply take the office phones and plug it into their respective Internet connection at home on a low call-volume holidays! Not the most ideal family time, I know, but allows  you to spend most of your time with your family while monitoring the inbound calls.

Why not forward to cellphone, you ask? This is the most common and most obvious practice during the holidays and definitely a good option for an analog customer, but you are missing out on several features that may be important to you while handling the call. Office phones do more than just ring your phone. They record calls, they tell you who’s on the phone, they can transfer you to other extensions, they allow call queues for larger teams in call center environment, and they even play nice (sometime annoying) hold music. So, why not maintain your professionalism in handling the customer calls like they deserve during the holidays while spending your “work days” at home?