An owner takes two weeks off for the first time in three years. He sets an automatic reply saying he will respond on the fifteenth.
He comes back to forty messages. Perhaps eight are still live. The rest asked about availability, price or a job they needed doing, and they found somebody else within a day.
The holiday cost him two weeks of work plus the two weeks of enquiries, and the following year he will consider whether it is worth going at all.
Option 1: close and say nothing
The default, and the most expensive. Enquiries arrive, get no reply, and the business appears to have stopped trading.
Option 2: an automatic reply
Honest, cheap and largely ineffective, since it tells people to wait and most of them will not, which is the pattern in holiday cover when you are the business.
Option 3: check messages on holiday
What most owners actually do, which means not having a holiday, and answering badly from a phone while pretending to be present with family.
Option 4: ask a colleague or friend to cover
Works for some trades and fails where knowledge is specific, and it places a real obligation on somebody who is not being paid.
Option 5: an answering service
Captures calls and cannot answer anything about the business, so callers get a courteous message taker rather than an answer.
Option 6: something that actually answers
Handles the routine questions, books what can be booked, captures everything else properly and alerts somebody only for genuine emergencies.
Decide: what genuinely cannot wait
Most businesses have a small category of genuine urgency and a large category that can be answered on return, and the two should be separated.
Decide: what can be booked in your absence
Standard jobs at standard prices, at dates after the return, which is work secured rather than an enquiry parked.
Decide: what should be captured and held
Everything else, with a clear statement of when somebody will respond, which is considerably better received than a bare out of office.
Decide: who to alert and how
One nominated route for genuine emergencies, so the owner is interrupted rarely rather than either constantly or not at all.
Decide: what to say about the absence
Honesty works. Somebody told plainly that the owner is away until the fifteenth and offered a booking for the sixteenth frequently takes it.
Decide: what happens on the day of return
A prioritised list rather than forty unsorted messages, which is the difference between a manageable morning and a lost week.
Recognise: this is the same problem as a busy day
Which is why it is worth solving properly rather than seasonally, as set out in answering enquiries when you are the only person.
Make the fortnight cost nothing
An assistant that answers the routine questions, books straightforward work for after the return, captures everything else with a stated response date and alerts one person for genuine emergencies means a holiday costs two weeks of work rather than two weeks of work and forty enquiries. Set it up through install the widget and train your bot. The daily version sits in the enquiry that arrived while you were on a job, and the arithmetic in how to free up 10 hours a week with. Start at try, and the sector view sits under small business.