Time-of-day routing lets you route incoming phone calls to different phone numbers or to voicemail depending on the time of day, day of week, or day of month. You can route calls based on your company’s business hours, and forward calls elsewhere when your office is closed.

Time of Day Routing Overview

Time-of-day routing is one of the most widely requested features that CallForwarding offers.  A large percentage of our customers work in international markets.  Time-of-day routing makes it possible for customers like you to conduct business with their clients around the world that are in different time zones.  Time-of-day routing simplifies managing different schedules because calls can be routed by the predetermined criteria that you choose.

How does Time of Day Routing Work?

Time-of-day routing allows you to forward incoming calls to a specific extension depending on the time of day, day of week, and on the month. You can set up multiple forwarding rules to cover office hours, holidays, planned downtime, and other events.

CallForwarding.com toll free numbers, as a typical example, include a self-care user portal that gives you the ability to control all advanced forwarding settings.  You can decide when and where a call should be forwarded.  A simple example might be a company that has offices on both the east and west coast of the US. Early morning calls in the west can be routed to a New York office.  While calls in the east after 5pm in New York could be routed to a Los Angeles office.

The sample dialog shown here illustrates just how simple it is to create a forwarding rule that depends on day and time. Time-of-day routing allows you to maximizing the coverage of live interaction with customers and extends the ‘regular office hours’ of operation without any additional staff hours.  You can also implement time of day routing for vacations or holidays.  Therefore, by setting time-of-day routing up in advance, your company will not lose any calls.

Benefits of Time of Day Routing

Time-of-day routing allows you to make the most of your incoming calls and maximize sales.   Route calls based on your company’s business hours, automatically transfer callers to the nearest store, pre-qualify leads or ensure that calls are always getting handled by the best call center.  CallForwarding’s time-of-day routing services offer many benefits, including these.

Increase Conversion Rates

Time-of-day routing allows you to maximize the amount of customer interaction by connecting with a live representative.  Time of day routing ensures that your calls are not only answered, but that they are answered by someone who can take care of the caller’s needs.

Easy to Use Interface Lets You Update Frequently

CallForwarding’s self- care interface puts you in control.  It  gives you the option to manage your time-of-day routing settings based on your ever-changing business or campaign needs.  Calls can be instantly forwarded to a specific destination based on time of day, day of the week, week of the year and so forth.

Never Miss a Call

All businesses have regular business hours but what happens with after-hours calls?  Time-of-day routing is an effective tool for managing these kind of phone calls.  If your office closes at 5 PM, you can have your calls automatically forwarded to a mobile number.  Going on vacation?  Set up specific numbers to ring to your cell phone during certain hours and set up a voicemail message directing them to call back during the next regular business hours.

The end goal of toll-free number time-of-day routing is to make sure the maximum amount of calls are handled by live operators.  You want to interact with your customers whenever possible.  Time-of-day routing is the perfect tool to accomplish this.

Include Time of Day Routing Plans in Your Campaign Creative Briefs

Every campaign creative brief should include a time-of-day routing plan for toll free numbers used to intake leads and questions from prospective buyers. Global campaigns should target display ad appearance by time zone and ad group, and toll free numbers used should also be coordinated by time zone. Customers in Malaysia come online while Atlanta and Philadelphia drivers are stuck in drive-home traffic, so calls at 6PM US Eastern Time should be routed to your call center in either Los Angeles or Sydney. Later in the day, your time of day routing should have an entry to send calls from Sao Paulo or Johannesburg to your agent in London. These routing decisions are easy to define and easy to implement for each of your toll free numbers. The results you can enjoy are significant, as leads handled quickly have a much higher close rate than stale leads up to 8 hours old.