Bank Holidays are governed by one main factor – the weather. It’s a very British thing that we all hope and pray for the ever elusive sunshine to make an appearance. In fact, I searched Google when writing this blog to try and ascertain exactly how many sunny Bank Holidays’ we’ve had in the past 5 years. Unfortunately, I couldn’t find the answer – but from looking at our historical call statistics I know there hasn’t been many.
So why does a telephone answering company use weather forecasts as part of its business planning?
Well the simple answer is that people will use the phone more when the weather is bad. Consider whether you would have done different things yesterday if the skies were clear blue with glorious sunshine. The chances are that you would have; and that would have influenced what phone calls you made.
Looking at our call statistics today I can see that yesterday we received a 33% increase in calls compared to the early May Bank Holiday last year. This increase in calls will have been influenced by a number of factors:
- Call volumes in general have been increasing. We have recently blogged about this and commenting on how our telephone answering services could be used as an ‘economic barometer’.
- The weather was not fantastic meaning that a large percentage of the population would have stayed at home or ‘inside’. When this happens there are the obvious distractions that we all experience – online shopping, renewing insurance policies, booking holidays, hassling the landlord about the leaking radiator etc, etc. All those jobs that we have been meaning to do for ages loom large and, thankfully, lots of companies are now available on the phone over Bank Holidays.
- If you think back to the early May Bank Holiday last year we had lovely weather. More people would have been outside enjoying the weather making less phone calls.
Our Operations Manager, Simon Ede, has been with Office response for the past 10 years and has been monitoring and recording our call data throughout. From this information (and some very smart workforce management software) we can accurately forecast how many calls we should expect. It’s not an exact science, but Simon’s instinctive understanding of how our customers’ may attract more or less calls dependant on the weather is priceless and allows us to correctly staff our contact centre.
So think again about what calls you made yesterday and if they were made on instinct. It may shock you that we would have thought about you making those calls at some point last week…
By Steve West
Marketing & Business Development Manager
