You can prepare for a seasonal peak; a bad day you just put up with
A seasonal call peak comes back every year, at roughly the same weeks, and lasts long enough for you to prepare for it. That is what sets it apart from a peak hour, which comes back every day at the same time and is dealt with differently (the peak hours guide covers that). To absorb a season, three decisions are enough: knowing when it arrives, planning how many calls you need to be able to take at the same time, and writing in advance the answers everyone is going to ask for.
Spotting your call seasons, trade by trade
The table below gives some pointers. It doesn't replace your own records: your season sometimes starts earlier than your neighbour's, depending on your customers and your region.
| Trade | Busy season | What callers want |
|---|---|---|
| Florist | Valentine's Day, Mother's Day, All Saints' Day | Orders, deliveries, special opening hours |
| Heating engineer, plumber | The first cold snap, the first frosts | Breakdowns, postponed servicing, emergencies |
| Hotel, restaurant | Summer, long weekends, school holidays, the end of the year | Bookings, availability, practical questions, often in other languages |
| Caterer, bakery and patisserie | The festive season, the wedding season | Orders for fixed dates, menus, collections |
| Driving school, gym, nursery | September, back to school | Enrolments, prices, places available |
| Accountant | Tax filing periods | Documents to provide, deadlines, appointments |
| Garage | Before the holiday getaways, tyre changes | Services, checks, “will it be ready in time?” |
| Landscape gardener | Spring | Quotes for garden maintenance and new gardens |
Looking back at last year
Before sizing anything, look for traces of last season.
- The call log from your operator or your phone system: the weeks when volume rises, and those when missed calls pile up.
- The calendar: the weeks when slots filled up fastest.
- Orders and invoices: they date the start and end of the wave precisely.
- Your memory and the team's: the week when nobody had time for lunch is rarely forgotten.
If you have no records at all, start now. The method for counting your missed calls works for an ordinary week as well as for a peak week: the difference between the two is what you need to absorb.
The real issue: calls that come in at the same time
During a season, it isn't the day's total that loses you customers, it's the calls that come in during the same minute. An ordinary line, like a person, can only hold one conversation at a time: the second caller hears the engaged tone or ends up in voicemail, and the day before a holiday, they call your competitor.
A call answering service doesn't always solve this: its operators are shared between several clients, and at peak times calls are left waiting. The comparison between an AI voice agent and a call answering service details this difference, and the difference in price, which usually follows volume.
Choosing the number of simultaneous calls
At Sayelo, the agent takes 1 call at a time on the Solo plan, 2 on Essentiel, 5 on Pro and 10 on Business. To choose, look at the worst moment of your season, not the average.
| At the height of your season | Guideline |
|---|---|
| Calls come in one at a time, rarely while another is in progress | 1 simultaneous call |
| Two calls often overlap, the line is engaged from time to time | 2 simultaneous calls |
| Calls come in waves, several in the same minute | 5 simultaneous calls |
| Several teams or several numbers, waves all day long | 10 simultaneous calls |
If your line is forwarded to the agent only when you don't answer, count only the calls you can't take yourself: you carry on answering when you can, and the agent takes the rest.
You can change plan at any time, at no cost, in either direction: you can move up before the season and back down afterwards. The price of each tier is on the pricing page, and the breakdown of how the price is calculated explains what makes it vary.
Minutes: plan a top-up rather than a surprise
A season uses more minutes than an ordinary month. At Sayelo, no overage is ever billed automatically: when your plan's minutes run out, you decide whether to add a top-up.
| Top-up | Price excl. VAT |
|---|---|
| 60 minutes | 19 € |
| 120 minutes | 35 € |
| 180 minutes | 49 € |
A top-up is valid until the end of the current cycle: unused minutes don't roll over to the following month. So it suits a short peak, such as a holiday or the September return. For a season lasting several months, like a heating engineer's winter, temporarily moving up to the next plan is often simpler. Minutes used are shown call by call: check them during the first week of the peak to see where you will be by the end of the month.
Preparing answers before the rush
During a season, the questions are almost always the same. Write the answers a few days beforehand, while you still have time, in your agent's profile or on a sheet by the phone.
- Special opening hours: open on the Sunday before Mother's Day, closed on New Year's Day, summer hours.
- Realistic timescales: the last date for orders, the lead time for a service visit, the priority given to breakdowns.
- What's still possible: the last places, the remaining slots, seasonal products.
- Seasonal prices, only the ones you have set: the agent never invents a price or a timescale.
- Emergencies specific to the period and how they are handled: a heating breakdown at an elderly person's home in the depths of winter isn't handled like an annual service.
- Languages: in summer, a hotel or restaurant gets calls from tourists. The agent switches to the caller's language, and the guide to multilingual phone answering explains how to prepare for it.
- Useful SMS: an ordering link, the collection address, the availability page. You prepare up to five, and the agent sends the right one during the call, with the caller's consent.
Our florists, heating engineers and hotels pages show, for each of these trades, what the agent says and does at the height of the season.
During and after the season
During the season, read the summaries you receive by email every evening. A question that keeps coming up without an answer, a timescale that has changed, a product that has sold out: update the profile that same evening, and the agent applies it from the next call. Keep an eye on your minutes and add a top-up before you run out.
Afterwards, three steps: move back down a plan if you moved up, note the exact dates the peak started and ended, and compare your missed calls with the previous year's. Next year, you will start from your own figures, not from an impression.
The idea isn't to hand the season over to a machine. Your team keeps looking after customers at the counter, in the workshop or in the rooms, and the agent takes the wave of calls the team can't take: backing up your teams, never replacing them.
