Despite the economy, analysts expect this holiday season to be brisk for retailers the Friday after Thanksgiving as well as the Monday following that weekend. Here’s some simple, inexpensive steps your business can take to ensure maximum revenues this year.

Whether it’s because of the sluggish economy or cheapening prices on products imported from China and other countries, this years retailers are slashing prices on electronics and other consumer goods for the infamous “Black Friday“. Many are offering price cuts on this one day only and other online stores such as Amazon are expecting to have another record setting year on “Cyber Monday,” the Monday following the Thanksgiving holiday.

If you sell to consumers and have invested in any kind of advertising this year, chances are that your phones are a primary means of sales or support. Has anyone ever tested your phones during such peak times to see if potential customers receive fast-busy signals or if the phone phone number goes straight to voicemail? In conjunction with this, online retailers often forget to advertise their telephone availbility. Put a call-to-action in a prominent place on each page of your website during your peak shopping days. A good way to do this is Click-to-Call. This will put an image link on your site to encourage your customers to call you if they have problems getting through online. As an added bonus, you can also put it in your e-mail signature. View a demo of this feature.

After hours, how is your business handling calls? Do they go to your standard voicemail or something with a holiday theme? This is a great opportunity to not only wish your customers a Happy Thanksgiving, but to also showcase any special sale that you may have. Perhaps something like this…

“Happy Thanksgiving from Acme Corporation. Our offices are currently closed, but we will open again on Friday, November 27. Did you know that we are having a holiday sale on all anvils through Dec. 5? Press 1 to hear more. If you need to leave a message for sales, press 2. If you need to ask a question about one of our products, press 3. To reach support, press 4. To repeat this menu, press 0.”

It’s always surprised me that while the telephone system for businesses are relied upon to deliver customers, little thought has been put into the capacity of available phone lines for incoming calls. Here’s a typical small business retail situation: 8 Phones with 4 Phone Lines. Many premised-based PBX systems (office phone systems that dominated the land-lines of many businesses for decades) are designed to have more phones than actually available phone lines. That’s because engineers that designed those phone systems assumed that if one had 8 phones, not all phones would be in use at the same time. And because traditional land lines from telephone companies can have considerable installation times and ongoing monthly costs, such were the design parameters of many SMB (small to medium sized business) phone systems.

That works for most of the year – except for the holidays! That’s when a virtual phone system, or “Business Phones as a Service”, can come in as overflow capacity. That’s because companies that provide such services have tens of thousands of extra available phone lines that they can allocate automatically and on-demand for such small businesses.

Don’t delay, Make your plans today to get your holiday presence organized on your phones. It won’t take long and gives that personal touch!

Photo by xybermatthew and Retrothing