Posted by Eleanor Webb-Dickin on the 14 May 2022
Allowing your business to stay open 24 hours a day, 7 days a week may not be a very appealing prospect due to the inevitable cost, and also the additional responsibility it would entail. However, recently, solutions to both of these challenges have come to light, and integrating them into your business model could help you benefit from the huge number of advantages that 24/7 business hours bring.
Certain industries should prioritise looking into this option, for example, businesses that rely heavily on customer interaction, businesses that have a lot of competitors to contend with and business which benefit from working at pace. Here we take a look at some of the benefits of having longer opening hours, and discover some solutions that could help you overcome the fear you may be associating with them.
Putting Yourself in the Shoes of Your Customers
By limiting your business to traditional business hours, you’re missing out on key periods of time where existing and potential customers are at their most proactive and motivated. Most customers are unable to make personal calls or browse the web during their own hours of work, which more often than not will follow the traditional pattern. Instead, evenings and weekends are the times when they are most likely to go in search of your products, or be influenced by your marketing. 1 in 9 British employees work through the evening and night, meaning that a whopping 90% of potential customers are not available during normal business hours.
Even those customers with part time jobs will have other distractions to contend with during the day, such as childcare, trips to the supermarket and social occasions. Through opening up your hours outside of these timeframes, you can profit from the quieter periods of customers schedules, when it’s far easier to get their attention.
Keeping Options Open
Often, people act on inspiration or react to unforeseen circumstances when it’s comes to needing products. For example, falling pregnant might require an immediate search for prenatal products, or noticing a threat to your health might result in you being on the look out for a quality healthcare provider. It is therefore difficult to predict when potential customers might be at their most susceptible. Restricting your opening hours significantly reduces the chance of you monetising these opportunities when they are at their most lucrative, instead, forcing you to limit yourself to leads acquired only during office hours, often after the moment has passed.
Facing Competition
Some industries are part of saturated markets and therefore constantly struggle to remain superior to their competitors. There can be times when it is hard to have a unique selling point when developments are fast across the board, however, 24/7 business hours are still a rarity and are, therefore, a great way to stand out from any crowd.
The convenience factor of longer opening hours makes you extremely attractive to customers with busy lives, which is almost everyone, in fact, 90% of customers believe an immediate response is important when it comes to customer service. So, having longer business hours makes you the obvious choice compared to companies who have more hoops to jump through. Convenience is crucial and another way in which you can stand out in this way is by offering a live chat service 24/7 too. Live chat is the most popular form of communication between customers and businesses as its efficiency is second to none.
Customer Service
24/7 opening hours are a sure fire way of boosting your customer service ratings. They allow you to be accessible as and when your customers need you, and ensure that you respond to any queries quickly. There’s nothing more frustrating than waiting on hold with a company, or simply being unable to speak to anyone between 5pm and 9am when you have an urgent issue. This is particularly the case with companies such as letting agencies and clinics, who have a significant responsibility when it comes to customer wellbeing. Full-time workers in the UK work an average of 42.5 hours a week (8.5 hours a day) so if you want to catch them, you have to start thinking outside the box.
Once you start to deliver excellent customer service, your reputation will improve rapidly and word of mouth will ensure that you are the first in your field to spring to mind when your target audience require your service or products.
Improving Workflow
Another benefit of having 24/7 business hours is that they improve workflow. There is a tendency to lose motivation towards the end of the day, whereas it is always the middle of the day no matter what shift your staff are working when business hours are endless. This may help with overall productivity as staff will be motivated for longer. Furthermore, no closing time means there are no limits to when the management team can initiate change in reaction to problems, or introduce new growth strategies. This, in turn, helps your business to develop at a faster pace.
ROI
Almost every business has a strategy in place, for example a marketing strategy, designed to attract a constant stream of new customers. Closing just as your customers leave work, and opening just as they begin, causes the return on this investment to be stunted. Potential new clients will have access and be susceptible to your efforts in their free time, for example peak internet usage is at 11pm, so any reaction triggered by your online marketing will need to be capitalised on during the late hours of the evening before its effects wear off.
24/7 business hours allow for more fluidity and you can be ready and waiting to convert leads into new business as soon as they arrive. This is a key way in which you can steal a majority of the market, as most of your competitors will miss out on the significant percentage of the interest the comes their way during some of the busiest customer activity times.
International Clients
If you’re thinking of branching out, whether that’s through an attempt to penetrate a new target audience, or you’d like to globalise your company logistics, 24/7 business hours are a must. This level of accessibility eradicates the issue of international time zones, opening up, literally, a world of opportunity for your business.
You customer base could grow exponentially as there would be no limitations to when your products or services could be delivered, or to when your customers could communicate with you. Furthermore, other areas of your business would have the freedom to grow without time zone restrictions, for example you could start to supply abroad or use foreign suppliers to help cut costs.
How to Make it Work for You
As you can see, there are endless benefits to increasing your business hours, but many will still feel restricted by the potential cost of doing so. Luckily, 24/7 business hours are no longer reserved for wealthy companies, thanks to the option of outsourcing your communications. Now, there are companies like Cymphony who specialise in call-handling and live chat services, who can integrate seamlessly into your business, providing help when needed.
Switching to 24/7 business hours no longer requires a huge re-structuring operation, you can simply hand over the reigns at the end of your working day, and take them back when the next day begins. While you’re taking a break, Cymphony would take over; handling customer queries through the night and during weekends; helping your business to grow without limits and without sacrifice. This might sound expensive, but Cymphony work on a pay per minute basis, ensuring that there is a return on anything you invest.
In addition, you can rely on the fact that any communication is being handled with the upmost professionalism thanks to the experience and skills of highly trained call-handlers and live chat agents. Thanks to its affordability, outsourcing in this way is opening the door for any businesses to achieve its full potential, creating an equal market amongst competitors that isn’t based on unfair advantage. Could it be time to take your business to the next level and open those doors 24/7?
