It’s the end of the year, and it’s time for you and your team to take some time off.
Did reading that sentence fill you with dread? Chances are, you work at a startup or small business. Taking time to unplug from work is more important now than ever. Studies show that 82% of employees experience burnout to some degree. One of the biggest culprits: feeling unable to balance work and personal life.
But when you work for a startup or small business, unplugging from work can be nerve-racking. You don’t want to leave your customers or prospects hanging. Fortunately, with the right tools and a little planning, you can ensure you and your team get the time off you need without leaving customers wondering where you’ve gone.
Below, we cover tips for setting expectations with your customers and securing stress-free holiday time off.
Before you unplug
Ensuring restful time off for you and your team starts long before you shut off the lights. With some advance planning, you can make sure customers and prospects feel taken care of, even when you and your team step away.
Update your calendar settings
If you work in a customer-facing role like sales, you don’t want to risk customers, prospects, or potential partners booking a meeting with you when you’re away from the office.
Ensure your holiday time off is blocked out in your calendar, along with any scheduling tools you use, such as Calendly.
Notify customers in advance
Nobody likes unpleasant surprises — customers least of all. One of the most thoughtful things you can do before you close up for the holidays is notify people in advance that you’ll be out of the office. That way, customers and prospects won’t expect to hear from you during that time.
A week or two before the holidays, consider adding a quick note to all of your customer-facing channels. A few examples of the channels you’ll want to update:
- Website
- Social media
- Auto-attendant
- Voicemail
- Live chat
- Email signatures
- Help center
- Office/building signage
Here are some examples of messages you can use across channels to give callers a heads up about your upcoming time off:
- Thanks for reaching out. We want to let you know that our office will be closed from [date] until [date].
- Thanks for contacting [your company]! Please be aware that our office will be closed from [date] until [date].
- We appreciate you getting in touch! Our office will be closed from [date] until [date], and we’ll respond to your message when we return.
Help customers help themselves
Just because your company is out of the office doesn’t mean your customers have to wait to get their questions answered. If you have a knowledge base, chatbot, or FAQ page where customers might be able to get their questions answered, make sure it’s up to date and easy to find before you head out. That way, customers can get quick answers to their questions without anyone from your team needing to be on call.
When it’s time to close up, you can even include a note on all the platforms listed above, letting customers know where they can find those resources. If you want to take self-service a step further, you can use AI to handle inquiries automatically — which brings us to the next tip.
Set up an AI agent to handle calls while you’re closed
“Are you open January 1st?” “What are your holiday hours?” Instead of sending callers to voicemail, an AI agent can answer these questions instantly — even at midnight on Christmas Eve. Your customers get answers immediately, and you never lose a lead to a competitor who answered the phone.
Sona, the AI voice agent for Quo, formerly OpenPhone, doesn’t just answer calls — it has actual conversations with callers and can answer FAQs. Plus, Sona can collect names, reasons for calling, and contact info. It can even text links to helpful resources like knowledge base articles for troubleshooting issues.
Setting up a voice agent like Sona is easy. Just upload your holiday schedule, shipping deadlines, FAQs, and other helpful information. When customers call to ask about delivery times or return policies, Sona answers accurately without putting anyone on hold or making them wait for a callback.
Configure holiday call routing
If you have a rotating staff schedule for the holidays, smart call routing helps callers reach the right person quickly. You can customize your call flow to ring only team members who are working or route unanswered calls to an AI voice agent instead of voicemail.
In Quo, you can easily set up temporary holiday routing separate from your regular routing. When Thanksgiving hits, flip to your holiday flow with one click. Back to work? Switch back just as easily. No need to rebuild your entire call flow every time a holiday approaches.
When it’s time to unplug
Once the big day comes and it’s time for your R&R, that’s when automation becomes your friend. By updating your settings on your calendar, email, chat application, and phone, you can ensure no communication goes unaccounted while you’re away from your devices.
Turn on your out-of-office notifications
When it’s time to close for the holiday, be sure to switch yourself to “out of office” on all of your communication platforms, including email, chat, and calendar.
Update your company’s business hours
Setting your business hours is important year-round, but it becomes doubly important around the holidays. That’s especially true if you and your team will be working irregular hours. For example, you might work reduced hours a couple of days leading up to the holidays and then shut down completely on days like Christmas and New Year’s Day.
Before you leave, make sure you update your company’s business hours anywhere customers might look for them, including:
- Google My Business
- Social media
- Your company’s website
If you’re using a VoIP system like Quo, you can also adjust your business hours on your phone system. That way, incoming calls automatically route according to your preferences. That could be to your voicemail, an AI agent like Sona, or another team member who’s available.
Change your business voicemail greeting
Speaking of voicemail, you’ll want to update yours before you head out of the office for the holidays. A standard “sorry I missed your call” message works fine when you’ll get back to the person in a few hours or the next day. For a longer time away, be clear about how long you’ll be gone and when customers and prospects can expect to hear back from you.
Before you close up shop, make sure you update both your personal and company-wide voicemail greetings. Here’s what you might say on your company-wide number:
- “Thank you for your call! The entire [your company team] is away from the office from [date] until [date]. Your call is important to us, and you will be hearing from the first available representative as soon as we are back.”
- “We appreciate your call. Our team is out of the office for the holidays, but we will return on [date]. Please leave us a message, and we will return your call as soon as we can. Thank you for choosing [your company].”
- “Thanks for calling [your company]. Our team is taking some much-deserved time off for the holidays. We’ll be back in the office on [date] and will return your call as soon as possible. Thank you!”
And here are a few professional voicemail greeting examples of what you might say on your direct number:
- “You’ve reached [your name] at [your company]. I’m out of the office until [date]. Please leave your name, telephone number, and a short message, and I’ll return your call when I get back. Happy holidays!”
- “Hi! This is [your name] at [your company]. I’m away from the office from [date] until [date] If you leave a message, I’ll get back to you as soon as I can! Thanks.”
- “Hello! You’ve reached [your name] at [your company]. I’m away from the office from [date] until [date]. For immediate assistance, please [description of next steps the caller can take.]”
Set up auto-replies
A lot of the time, customers just want to know that they’re heard — even if they don’t receive an in-person response right away.
Set up auto-replies to send text messages automatically in response to incoming calls or texts. Here are a few out-of-office text message examples you might use during the holidays to let customers know you received their message and set expectations for when you’ll get back to them:
- “Thanks for reaching out! We’re out of the office from [date] until [date]. We’ll get back to you as soon as we’re back.”
- “Hello! We appreciate your message. Our team is out of the office for the holidays. You should hear back from us no later than [date].”
- “Sorry we missed your call. We’re out of the office for the holidays, but we’ll be back on [date].”
Create holiday text message templates
When you’re running with a smaller team during the holidays, communicating quickly and efficiently becomes even more important. Create pre-written text message templates you can send with one click when customers reach out.
In Quo, you can save these text templates as snippets and share them with your team. For example: “Thanks! I’ll get that quote over to you this afternoon,” or “Just checked — we can fit you in on [date] at [time]. Does that work?” or “Got your message! Let me look into that, and I’ll call you back within the hour.”
These templates save your team from retyping the same responses dozens of times throughout the day. Whether it’s you or your part-time holiday staff replying, customers get quick, professional responses.
Schedule holiday greetings in advance
Before you leave for the holidays, schedule your “Happy New Year” messages, holiday greeting texts, and appointment reminders to send automatically. That way, your clients stay informed and feel valued even while you’re celebrating with family — no need to step away from dinner to send texts.
Test your holiday setup
Before you officially close, test everything. Call your business number and text yourself to make sure your holiday routing works, your auto-replies send, and your AI agent knows the answers to your most common questions.
Walk through the full customer experience: What happens when someone calls after hours? Does your voicemail greeting mention your return date? Are your text auto-replies accurate? Five minutes of testing now prevents customer frustration later.
Mute notifications
Now comes the most important thing: the actual unplugging part of unplugging for the holidays. After all, it’s hard to unwind when there’s a stream of incoming notifications reminding you of all the work you’re missing. s reminding you of all the work you’re missing.
Before you log off for the holidays, don’t forget to turn off notifications for all your work-related apps. These may include email, internal messengers like Slack or Microsoft Teams, and your business phone. In Quo, you can mute notifications by activating Do Not Disturb.
Find yourself still compulsively checking Slack and other apps on your phone after muting notifications? Consider temporarily uninstalling them.
When you get back
One of the hardest things about taking time away from work is thinking about all that work piling up while you’re gone. But don’t forget: all of the systems we’ve talked about throughout this post are tools at your disposal to direct and control your workflow and give yourself a chance to get back in the groove.
Turn notifications back on strategically
When you’re back to work, you want to open up all of the lines of communication that you shut down. But that doesn’t mean you have to switch all systems to green at the same time. Be kind to yourself and take advantage of the tools at your disposal to ease back in.
For example, you might open your customer-facing phone and email lines so customers can reach you, but keep your internal-facing communications like Slack or Microsoft Teams muted for an extra day while you catch up on your first priority — your customers.
Make catching up with customers a team effort
As the saying goes, many hands make light work. So why not make catching up with customers after the holidays a team effort?
Use mentions in Slack and Quo to close the loop on any open conversations, and ensure your work contacts get timely responses when you’re back in the office. Instruct anyone working over the holidays to leave detailed customer contact notes so anyone on your team can pick up where they left off. These notes ensure nothing falls through the cracks and customers don’t have to repeat themselves.
Have a restful holiday season
You’ve configured Sona, set up scheduled messages and auto-replies, and customized call flows with your holiday hours. Every question will get answered, every lead will be captured, and you can rest easy with the people who matter most: family and friends.
At Quo, we know firsthand how hard it can feel to take time off during the holidays — especially when you’re a small team and it feels like you need all hands on deck all the time. But we also know how valuable it is to step away, rest, and recharge.
Now go enjoy your holiday — you’ve earned it.
