Holiday Response Times on the Contact Page

A form sent on December 27

Somebody fills in your contact form on the afternoon of December 27. The page thanks them, and they assume somebody will be in touch.

Your office closes on Friday the 21st and reopens on January 2. The message waits six days in an inbox nobody is reading.

The sender knows none of that. After three days of silence they decide you are not interested, and by then they have usually written to somebody else.

Nothing on the site was wrong, exactly. It simply said nothing about the one fact that mattered that week: when a reply would come.

Every way in, over the holidays

• The contact form, which thanks everyone the same way all year.
• The main email address, read by whoever is in the office.
• Staff email addresses, some of them unread for two weeks.
• Facebook messages, where the page may still say it replies within the hour.
• The voicemail, still greeting callers with ordinary office hours.
• The Google listing, showing the regular week unless told otherwise.

The third goes unnoticed longest. A customer who has dealt with one person for years writes to that person directly, and the message sits in a mailbox its owner will not open until January.

Say it above the form

The notice belongs on the contact page, above the form, where it is read before somebody presses send rather than after.

It needs four things: the dates you are closed or short-staffed, the day replies resume, what happens to messages sent in between, and the number to ring if something cannot wait.

Use dates rather than phrases. Back after the holidays means different things to different people; back on Wednesday, January 2 means one thing.

A single line high on the home page, linked to the contact page, catches visitors who never get that far.

The promise after the form

If the thank-you page promises a reply the same working day, that promise is wrong for the next two weeks.

Change it for the closure, or add a line above it giving the holiday dates. Do the same for the automatic email the form sends, which usually repeats the year-round promise word for word.

These two messages follow somebody after they leave the site, which makes them worth more than the notice itself. A visitor who skimmed past the notice still reads the email.

Auto-replies on every inbox

Turn on an automatic reply for the main address, and for every member of staff who will be away, even for a few days.

Gmail calls it the vacation responder and Outlook calls it automatic replies. Both let you set the dates, so the reply starts when you leave and stops when you return.

Say the same as the contact page, in the same words: closed until, back on, and the number for urgent matters. A reply naming a colleague who is also away is worse than none.

Who to call if it cannot wait

Some messages cannot sit until January: a delivery that needs rescheduling, an order that has gone wrong, a breakdown.

Decide what counts as urgent in your business, who will answer, and between which hours, before writing a word. Then give that number on the page and in every auto-reply.

If nobody will answer at all, say that too, with the date you reopen. An honest closure is easier to plan around than a number that rings out.

Format the number so a phone can dial it with one tap, since many of these messages are written on one.

A worked example

A forklift dealer on the edge of an industrial park sells and rents lift trucks and runs a service department with three technicians in vans.

Its sales office closes from Christmas Eve until the new year, while one technician stays on call for breakdowns, since warehouses keep working through the holidays.

Last year the contact form went to the sales inbox. On the 27th, a warehouse manager whose only forklift had stopped during a stock count filled it in, saw a thank-you message, and waited.

The message was read on January 2. The on-call technician had been free all week; the website had simply never mentioned him.

This year the contact page opens with the holiday dates, the day sales replies resume, and the on-call number for breakdowns, set as a tappable link.

The form's confirmation email and every staff auto-reply say the same, and the voicemail gives the on-call number before anything else.

The voicemail and the listing

Callers need the same treatment. A greeting re-recorded with the closure dates and the urgent number covers people who never visit the site at all.

On Google My Business, special hours cover particular dates without touching your regular week, so the listing shows the closure and returns to normal by itself.

And if the Facebook page shows a fast response time, set an automatic reply on its messages, or have somebody check them each day.

Take it down on time

A holiday notice has an end date, and it should go into the calendar the day the notice goes up.

Left in place, closed until January 2 is still sitting above the form in February, and visitors start to doubt the rest of the page.

Whoever maintains the site can usually schedule both the notice and its removal, so nobody has to remember on the first morning back.

The counter-case

A business that stays open through the holidays at normal hours needs none of this, beyond checking that its listing says so.

One closed only for the statutory days can manage with a line in each auto-reply and its holiday hours set on Google.

And where customers almost always phone, the voicemail greeting may do more than the website.

But any business closing for a week or more should tell people before they send, not after: the dates, the day replies resume, and an urgent number.

Before you close

1. Decide the closure dates and the return day.
2. Decide what counts as urgent and who answers.
3. Put the notice above the form on the contact page.
4. Update the thank-you page and confirmation email.
5. Set auto-replies on every inbox left unread.
6. Re-record the voicemail with the same details.
7. Schedule the notice's removal for the morning you reopen.

Step two is what keeps the rest honest. A notice can only promise what somebody has agreed to do, and an urgent number is worthless if nobody answers it.

Making that urgent route work all year is covered in emergency service pages and the 24-hour promise.

Frequently asked questions

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