Decide these three things first
The setup itself is quick. What takes thought is what happens after the text goes out, and it is worth having answers before you switch anything on.
- Who reads the replies. In a one-person business this is obvious. With two or more people, decide now whether everyone sees every enquiry or whether one person triages, because "whoever gets to it" reliably becomes nobody.
- What you do with an urgent one. If your message invites people to flag emergencies, you need to have decided what you will actually do when one arrives at 6pm.
- What you are not taking on. Areas you do not travel to, work you do not do, hours you do not operate. Every one of those stated in the message is a callback you never have to make.
Writing the message
The rules are short: name first, reason second, one question third, and a way to flag urgency if you want one. A message that does those four things will outperform anything more elaborate.
The most common mistake is asking for too much. Every additional question is a reason to reply later, and later usually means not at all. Ask for the one thing that decides whether you can help — usually the suburb or the job — and get the rest in the conversation.
If you want ready-made wording, the templates guide has twelve you can copy and change the name on.
Connecting it
This is the part people expect to be difficult and it is not. Your number stays with your provider and keeps working exactly as it does now. What changes is that unanswered calls also trigger a message.
Nothing needs to be installed on your phone, no customer needs to be told anything, and there is no switchover window where calls might be lost. If you turn it off later, your number is simply as it was.
Testing it properly
- Ring your number from a different phone and let it ring out completely. Check the text arrives and check how long it takes.
- Read it as a stranger would. Is it obvious in the first four words who sent it? If not, rewrite that part before anything else.
- Reply to it from the test phone and confirm the reply reaches you where you expect it.
- Test the after-hours message by running the test outside your set hours, not just during the day.
- Answer a test call as well, and confirm no text goes out. That is the behaviour people worry about most.
The first fortnight
Change nothing for two weeks. You need enough replies to see a pattern, and changing the message every few days means you never learn which version worked.
After a fortnight, read the replies rather than the statistics. They will tell you exactly what to adjust: detail people volunteer that you should be asking for, questions they keep asking that the message should answer, and any confusion about who you are.
Then make one change and give it another two weeks. Slow is faster here.
Written by the team at Kryon. We sell a missed-call text-back service, which is a conflict of interest worth stating outright — so where a guide would be improved by telling you not to buy anything, it does.