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Is Your Business Festive Season Ready?

Is Your Business Festive Season Ready?

It’s Christmas!

Advent has arrived, and 2026 is knocking on the door. Naturally, that means that the usual end-of-year madness is now in full flow. Everything from inventories, end-of-year reports, and annual reviews to the (in)famous Christmas staff parties are stealing all your attention. Then there is the fact that for many businesses, the holidays are the busiest time of year - particularly in retail. So there’s a lot to do, and often the smaller things can get overlooked, particularly when it comes to your business phone system.

That’s why we’ve updated our list of to-dos for the festive period to help ensure that you, your team, and your business don’t drop the ball (at least until New Year’s Eve) during the 2025 holiday period!

1. Business Opening Times Throughout The Holidays

You and your team are probably already well aware of your business’ opening time throughout the holidays, but if not, it’s time to get them set, as your operating hours and how you communicate them to customers are crucial to effective business communications throughout the season. They affect everything from your out-of-office autoresponder to Google My Business listings and even your business phone system time checks and phone system prompts!

2. Phone System Time Checks

There’s nothing worse for a business’ corporate image than when a customer calls and the phone just keeps ringing because your team are already on holiday and there is no-one there to answer the phone. Conversely, what if your business hours are extended during the holidays due to increased demand, but your customers can’t reach you because you haven’t updated your phone system time-of-day call routing?

So if your business hours change in any way during the holidays, it is time to update your business phone system time checks (Time-Based Call Routing / Time-of-Day Call Routing). Depending on the size of your business, you will likely have two or more departments with individual call queues (teams in pascom) and therefore, it is essential that you make changes not only to calls to your main business phone number (subscriber number), but also to all your team extensions. This will ensure that even customers who call your teams directly without going through your phone system IVR, will also be handled correctly.

With the pascom phone system, it is possible to cover countless scenarios, guarantying that no matter how your business hours change, your business availability throughout the holiday period can be expertly managed to meet your customer expectations - so even if like us, some of your teams work throughout the holidays while others don’t, calls will be expertly handled.

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3. Festive Phone System Greetings

For many businesses, the holiday season is the busiest time of year whereby high call volumes are to be expected and upto this point, everything we have done has been somewhat theoretical. A bit of strategy, some configuration adjustments, but now it’s time to get real by updating your phone system prompts and greetings. Greetings are your company’s voice and as such they are the first touch point between your business and your callers and therefore the ideal opportunity to make that ever important great first impression!

Making a good impression right off the bat is always important, but even more so when you consider the scope for potential gains and growth during the festive season, so your business telephone system greetings and prompts need to be top notch. In the past, this used to be a real hassle, that involved speak over actors, recording studios and no small amount of financial outlay. However, things have moved on and these days it is possible to produce professional greetings in minutes thanks to our AI-powered voice prompts generator.

That said, I reckon I am probably not alone when I write this; people can still tell AI from real human prompts - even when it has become increasingly difficult. I also believe that your festive season prompts need that little extra professionalism, especially given the potential importance of the the holiday season for many businesses. So if you’re looking for something special for your customer greetings this year, then as a pascom customer, our professional prompts recording service is precisely what your business needs.

Information to include

When creating professional prompts for the festive period, it is important to include certain information that you most definitely include to prevent your customers being in the dark. Secondly, the prompt voice should be friendly, warm and welcoming whilst maintaining your company voice.

  1. Keep customers up to date with your festive opening times as soon as possible.
  2. Highlight any specific days/dates where your business is closed, i.e. public holidays, company holidays etc.
  3. If you’re offering callers extended holiday opening hours, promote them!
  4. Promote specific information for specific departments if some aspects of your business close down while others stay open.
  5. If you close during the holidays, be specific about dates and make it clear when your business opens up again.
  6. Specify contact options for urgent enquiries should this be applicable to your business.

Keeping your callers and customers up-to-date with your holiday opening times is a valuable courtesy that they will really appreciate, and it will reduce the number of questions that you and your team have to answer about your business’ availability during the festive period.

4. Seasonal Music on Hold (MoH)

Now that you’ve got your time checks and prompts sorted, it is time to get your Music on Hold working for you! First up, updating your Music on Hold to reflect the season is a great way of improving the customer experience by creating a more joyful and festive vibe for callers. Appropriate holiday Music on Hold that reflects your brand can have a number of positive effects that enhance the caller experience. Just remember to create a good selection of holiday music, that you can rotate, so callers don’t always hear the same music on repeat.

Seasonal Music on Hold Benefits at a Glance

  1. Enhance how customers perceive your brand: Festive MoH portrays professionalism and engagement with the season.
  2. Strengthens emotional connections: people love holiday songs and using them can evoke strong emotional ties and positive memories .
  3. Boost sales: Creates more positive mood and emotional connections, making customers more will to buy from you, especially when combined with promotional messaging.
  4. Avoids repitrepetitionion and boredom: Changing up your music removes the monotony for callers and prevents them becoming bored with the same generic music used by everyone else.

First and foremost, the right Music on Hold can help make any waiting feel more enjoyable and therefore shorter, and therefore positively impacting the perceived experience. Secondly, festive Music on Hold helps align your business with the holiday spirit, humanising your brand, creating an emotional connection between your business and your customers.

Finally, updating your Music on Hold for the holiday season and mixing in promotional messaging provides businesses with an excellent marketing opportunity to promote seasonal offers and in turn drive sales, especially if your business operates in a retail or B2C environment.

pascom festive Mobile VoIP app

A word to the wise here, when done well, choosing the right music mixed in with the right messaging will help portray your business as professional, organised and, to coin a 2025 phrase, “locked-in” with customer expectations, helping create an environment where customers are happier and therefore more willing to spend. However, get it wrong, and the impact can be the opposite, so it is worth ensuring that your choices align with your brand and more importantly with what your customer expectations are. Furthermore, when using custom Music on Hold, you will also always need to consider copyright licensing, so be sure to check for any music licensing requirements. If in doubt, it is best to go to the professionals - yes it costs more, but you should be on the right side of the law.

If you’re looking for more “pizzazz” with your Music on Hold by mixing in Seasonal and Promotional Messaging, then professionally recorded is the only way to go, unless of course you have a recording studio in house and the required editing skills and experience. If not, then we’ve got our pascom customers covered here as well, just hit the button below:

Professional Voice Over Prompts

5. Update Voicemail with Seasonal Greetings

Voicemail is such a decisive tool. It’s like marmite, some love it and some hate it. In many industries where customers have a dedicated contact person, e.g. accountancy and real-estate, voicemail tools are still very popular and frequently used. That said, I am not a big fan of voicemail as there are other options which, in my opinion, offer better outcomes in terms of customer service and satisfaction - but that’s a topic for another post. That aside, if your business uses voicemail, updating your Voicemail Greetings is another touchpoint where you can customise your approach to delivering a memorable and engaging in-call experience.

The problem with voicemail is that no-one really likes being transferred to voicemail if they haven’t already had contact with the business. What is more, most people don’t believe that their voicemail message will really be listened to, let alone actioned upon, meaning most callers don’t even bother to leave a message. In fact, according to Forbes research, 80% of callers directed to voicemail DON’T leave a message and this presents a big problem for small businesses who don’t have the resources to answer every call.

But it’s not all doom and gloom - voicemail gives you 24/7 availability, So if your small medium-sized business relies on Voicemail, then you will need to seriously up your game over the holiday season and your greetings will have to be way more than pretty special to keep the customer engaged and motivated enough to even leave a message!

Once you’ve succeeded in getting customers to leave voicemail messages, then it’s time to back up your “promise” with almost immediate action. The longer you wait, the chances of that caller becoming a customer decrease dramatically.

Thankfully, powerful business phone system tools such as pascom’s voicemail to e-mail, in-app voicemail notifications and playbacks plus our new AI-driven automatic Voicemail Transcription are included as standard and can be invaluable in optimising and improving response times to streamline and make your customer service extra special.

Keep the season's greetings short and sweet, yet festive. Don't forget to mention New Year; otherwise they might seem a bit odd if a customer calls after Christmas. It is also imperative to include the date that you will be back at work and options if the enquiry is urgent - this helps manage customer expectations and also REMEMBER to change them again once you're back in the office.

6. Let pascom Intelligence and AI Pick Up The Slack

As alluded to in the points 2 and 5 regarding seasonal prompts and Voicemail greetings, your pascom phone system includes a host of powerful AI tools in the form of pascom Intelligence, so why not let them take up the slack this Christmas?

AI Voice Prompts

Firstly, as mentioned above, the pascom AI voice prompts generator can be used to quickly generate and use professional voice prompts within your call queues. A good use case could be when you are receiving numerous calls and your existing prompts aren’t keeping customers informed accordingly, you can quickly swap out the prompt with the AI-generated prompt and keep your callers in the loop.

AI Voicemail and Call Recording Transcriptions

Secondly, automatic AI transcriptions are available for both pascom voicemail users and businesses that use call recordings. The major benefit here is that transcriptions are extremely useful when it comes to driving service and reducing response times by making messages and recordings text based and therefore readable. Not only are readable recordings and messages quicker to understand, they are also searchable.

The result, your response times and service standards will improve as users can simply read the transcriptions within the pascom apps instead of having to listen to the audio, you no longer have to play back the audio files to understand the content, a task that is time-consuming and not very effective, particularly for longer messages. Beyond this, finding and understanding the content again is much quicker and more efficient, as you only need to search for keywords and the pascom Apps will do the rest, eliminating the need to listen to countless audio files before finding the right one.

AI Voice Agents

While there is no substitute for human interaction and immediate service/responses, it is sadly not possible to answer 100% of calls around the clock. Using an AI-powered Voice Agent gives businesses a 24/7 telephone presence and allow businesses to handle every customer call without dropping the ball - crucial in today’s fast-paced, on-demand consumer culture in which customers expect immediate service.

Of course, having AI answer calls for you doesn’t actually do anything for customer service if there is no follow-up, so it is what happens under the hood and within your team that is important. Just like an “ordinary” call, AI answered calls create an entry within your team call histories, giving every member access to the information contained.

But that’s not all that the pascom Intelligence AI Agents do. Combining transcription technology with further AI tools, pascom AI agents can summarise the call, highlight keywords such as Customer Number or Call Reason, and even gauge the callers’ mood on hand from the tone of the speaker’s voice. This information is then included within the easily identifiable AI Agent call log, allowing you and your colleagues to react appropriately to the customer call almost instantly.

7. Connect with Customers via WhatsApp Business Messaging

As the world’s largest messaging platform, it is mostly a given that your customers are using WhatsApp and this presents an excellent opportunity to connect and engage with them at scale directly from your pascom business phone system - keeping all your conversations in one place whilst connecting with your customer base where they are.

From simple “Happy Holidays” template messages with your business hours to order confirmations and even free-form chat (once initiated by the customer), integrating WhatsApp Business Messaging into your pascom telephone system opens up a whole new communications channel and with it so many additional benefits for the holiday season.

The beauty of WhatsApp Business Messaging via pascom is that, compare to other social media messaging, you are not restricted to using a mobile phone number. This allows you to use a phone number from your pascom SIP trunk and with a bit of forward-thinking, you can connect individual numbers from your departments to WhatsApp Business Messaging, for example sales, customer service, and support etc. This allows you to route incoming messages directly to employees who can actually help the customer, as opposed to going around the houses. As a result, response times and time to resolution are shortened, improving your overall customer service with a chat.

pascom’s WhatsApp Business Messaging integration is currently in BETA and will be officially released in January 2026, but if you want to benefit from it now, simply contact our sales / support team who will activate the BETA feature for your pascom phone system.

8. Update All Your Customer Touchpoints

It is essential to update all the touchpoints where a customer may try to contact you or learn about your business.

Even though over 70% of customers expect to have phone contact at some point in the purchasing process, your business phone system, while central to how you communicate, is not your only communication channel. Therefore, it is equally important to update all your customer touchpoints. To help you out, we’ve compiled a list, although it is by no means definitive:

  • Automatic Out-of-Office E-mail replies
  • Google MyBusiness Listings
  • Social Media Posts and About Sections
  • WhatsApp Store Front (if applicable)
  • Webpage ChatBots
  • Social Media Messaging Auto-responders, i.e. Messenger

So if your business experiences a slow down over the Christmas period, then now is the ideal time to try and test pascom with our 30-day free trial.

Summary

If you have any queries about pascom phone system features and how to use leverage the most benefit this Holiday Season, then check out some more of our How To guides as well as our desktop client, mobile app and web client user guides listed in our documentation.

If you, your team, your colleagues, or customers could benefit from an effective all-in-one video and business collaboration solution, then we’re here to help. Just give us a call on +49 991 291691 0 and get started with our free cloud phone system edition.

Wishing you a very Merry Christmas and Happy New Year 2026!