Closing for Snow and Telling Customers

Six in the morning, and the roads are bad

It snowed overnight. The side streets have not been cleared, staff are texting to ask whether to come in, and somebody has to decide whether the business opens today.

On the south coast this happens rarely enough that few businesses have a plan, and often enough that most get caught out every few winters.

The decision is the easy part. The hard part is that customers will check whether you are open before they set out, in several places, most of which still say you are.

Whatever you tell them has to be done from a phone, in the dark, quickly.

Where customers check, in order

• Google My Business, where most people look up hours before leaving home.
• Your website, which needs the notice on every page, not only the home page.
• Your Facebook page, with the notice pinned to the top.
• The phone, for the customers who call before driving over.
• Customers with bookings, who need to hear from you directly.
• The reopening notice, in the same places, in the same order.

The last is the one most often forgotten. A closure notice still up the next morning keeps customers away on a day you are open, and nobody tells you it is happening.

Special hours for one day

Google My Business has a setting for exactly this. Special hours apply to a single date, so you can mark today closed, or set shorter hours, without touching your normal week.

It can be done from a phone, in the Google My Business app or a browser, in a minute or two. Whoever might need to do it should be signed in on their phone before the snow arrives.

Resist editing the regular hours in a hurry. They stay changed until somebody changes them back, which is how a one-day closure becomes a listing that says closed all week.

A short post on the listing adds context, and drops out of view after a week by itself.

A banner on every page

On the website, the notice belongs in a bar along the top of every page, since many visitors arrive on a service or contact page and never see the home page.

Keep it plain, with the date written out: closed today, Monday, because of snow, reopening Tuesday at nine. Then nobody wonders, three days later, whether it is still true.

The difficulty is speed. If only whoever maintains the site can add the banner, it goes up once they reach a desk, which may be after customers have set out.

So have it built in advance: a notice bar that sits switched off until you turn it on from a phone.

Social posts and the phone

On Facebook, write the post and pin it, so visitors to the page see it before last week's offer.

Do not count on it reaching followers. Facebook shows a page's posts to only some of the people who follow it, fewer since last year's News Feed changes, so the post is for people who come looking.

The phone needs its greeting changed. Most voicemail services let you record a new greeting remotely, by calling in with a code, and that code is worth finding before you need it.

Customers with appointments

A notice does nothing for the customer who booked a two o'clock appointment last week and has no reason to check anything.

They need a text, an email or a call from you before they leave. Most booking systems can message everyone booked for a day at once.

Blocking the day matters as much as the messages. Online booking keeps taking appointments for a closed day unless somebody tells it not to.

A worked example

A consignment clothing store on a suburban high street, where consignors book drop-off appointments online, closed for a snowy Monday last winter.

The owner posted on Facebook at seven and assumed that was enough. The Google listing still showed normal hours, and online booking was still open.

Two consignors drove in on bad roads with bags of clothing and found the door locked. Another booked an afternoon drop-off online at ten, for that same day.

None of it was carelessness. Each system knew only what it had been told, and nobody had told it anything, because there was no list of what to tell.

The store now keeps a closure card beside the till, with the order to work through and the wording ready to paste.

Its booking system can block a day in two taps, and the owner can switch on the site's notice bar from her phone.

Write the wording now

The words take the time on the morning, so write them while nothing is happening.

Three versions cover most days: closed for the day, opening late, and closing early. Each names the date, says what happens to bookings and orders, and says when the next update will come.

Keep them in a note on two phones. And decide in advance who makes the call to close, and by when: a decision at half past eight reaches customers after many have left home.

Reopening is a notice too

Reopening needs the same round, in the same order.

Special hours set for one date lapse by themselves. If the closure ran longer, check that each extra day was entered as its own date.

Then switch off the banner, unpin and replace the Facebook post, restore the greeting, and reopen the booking calendar.

A closure notice still pinned a fortnight later is the same problem as a holiday notice in January: small, visible, and read as a sign that nobody is minding the business.

The counter-case

The full routine is more than some businesses need.

A trade that travels to its customers has no shop for anyone to drive to. For them the bookings are the whole job, and a call to each customer does more than any banner.

A business with almost no walk-in trade can keep it simpler: the listing, the phone greeting and the booked customers.

For everyone with a door customers might drive to, the order holds: the listing, the website, social posts, the phone, then reopening.

Before the next storm

1. Decide who calls the closure, and by when.
2. Sign in to Google My Business on two phones.
3. Have a notice bar built you can switch on.
4. Write three versions of the wording.
5. Learn to change the greeting remotely.
6. Check the booking system can block a day.
7. Write the reopening steps on the same card.

Step three is the one that has to happen before the weather, not during it. Everything else can be done from a phone in a hurry; a banner that does not exist yet cannot.

Making sure the listing returns to normal afterwards follows the same logic as holiday hours still showing in January.

Frequently asked questions

West Coast Media Solutions Inc. provides web design, web development, hosting, digital marketing, and business consulting to organisations across Canada, drawing on more than twenty-five years in the field.