Bank holidays are a welcome break for your team , but for your customers, business doesn’t always stop. They still have questions, problems, and purchasing decisions to make. And if they call your business and get a dead ring or a generic “this number is unavailable” message, there’s a good chance they’ll simply move on to a competitor who seems more reachable.
The good news? A modern VoIP phone system gives businesses the tools to handle calls professionally over any holiday without requiring your entire team to stay glued to their desks. Here are the five features you should have set up before the next bank holiday.
- Auto Attendant (IVR)
Think of the auto-attendant as a virtual receptionist that never takes a day off. When a customer calls your business over Easter weekend, instead of being met with silence or an endless ring, they hear a professional greeting, one that tells them your current opening hours, lets them know when you’ll be back, and gives them options for what to do next.
You can set it up to route urgent calls to an on-call team member, direct general enquiries to a voicemail inbox, or even point customers toward your website for self-service answers. It’s a small touch that makes a big difference to how professional and reliable your business appears, even when the office is quiet.
A well-configured auto-attendant also takes the pressure off your team. Instead of worrying about who’s responsible for answering the phone over the bank holiday, the system handles first contact automatically.
2. Call Forwarding and Hunt Groups
Just because your office is closed doesn’t mean your team is completely unreachable. Call forwarding lets you redirect incoming calls to a mobile, or home phone wherever your staff happen to be. So if a customer calls your main business number on Easter Monday, the call can go straight to whoever is on call that day, without the customer ever knowing they’ve been forwarded.
Hunt groups take this a step further. Rather than routing a call to one specific person, a hunt group rings multiple team members in sequence (or all at once) until someone picks up. It’s particularly useful for trades businesses, healthcare practices, or any business where missing an urgent call has real consequences.
The key advantage here is flexibility. You can set up different forwarding rules for different days, times, or types of calls, all within your VoIP system’s settings, with no need to involve your phone provider every time your schedule changes.
3. Voicemail to Email
Traditional voicemail is inconvenient at the best of times. Over a bank holiday, it’s even worse, staff don’t want to dial in and listen through a backlog of messages when they’re trying to enjoy time off..
Voicemail-to-email solves this neatly. When a caller leaves a message, the system automatically sends it to a designated email inbox, either as an audio file or as a transcribed text summary. Your team can scan their emails at a glance, identify anything urgent, and respond accordingly, without sitting through two minutes of hold music just to retrieve a 20-second message.
It also creates a written record of every missed call, which makes it much easier to ensure nothing slips through the cracks when the office reopens. Rather than relying on someone to remember to check the voicemail on Tuesday morning, every message is sitting in an inbox, timestamped and ready to action on.
4. Custom Holiday Schedules & Time-Based Routing
One of the most underused features in VoIP systems is the ability to schedule your call routing in advance. Instead of manually switching your phone settings on and off around each holiday, you can configure rules that trigger automatically based on the date and time.
For Easter, that might look like: normal routing on Thursday and Friday morning, a holiday greeting from Friday afternoon through Monday, and then standard business hours resuming on Tuesday. Set it once, and the system handles the rest without anyone having to remember to make a change at the right moment.
This also eliminates one of the most common holiday phone mishaps, the forgotten out-of-office message. Customers calling during closed hours get a clear, up-to-date greeting rather than a ringing phone with no answer, which goes a long way towards maintaining trust and managing expectations.
5. Mobile and Desktop Softphone Apps
A softphone app is perhaps the single most practical VoIP feature for small businesses operating over the holidays. It allows staff to make and receive calls on their official business number from any device, smartphone, or laptop without giving out personal numbers or relying on being in the office.
For a business owner or manager, this means you can handle an urgent client call from anywhere without it looking like the business is understaffed or disorganised. The customer sees your business number, hears your professional greeting, and has no idea you’re responding from your kitchen table.
Softphone apps also keep everything centralised. Call logs, recordings, and voicemails are all stored in the same system, so when your team returns to the office after the holiday, there’s a clear picture of what came in, what was handled, and what still needs following up.
We’ll shortly be releasing our own softphone, so watch this space!
Get Set Up Before The Long Weekend
Most of these features can be configured in under 30 minutes through your VoIP provider’s dashboard and the payoff is well worth it. Customers who reach a professional, helpful experience over a public holiday are far more likely to stick around than those who hit a wall of silence.
If you’re not sure whether your current phone system supports all of these features, it might be time to review your setup. Modern VoIP solutions are designed with exactly this kind of flexibility in mind, and for small businesses, the difference between a missed call and a handled one can be the difference between losing and gaining a customer.