It can be very annoying to have to call a business that closes at 5 p.m. on the dot and opens a minute before 9 a.m. If you need any form of customer service outside of these hours, forget it.
For many businesses there is probably little need for customers to call outside of normal hours, but for others there may be a lot to be gained from making themselves more available to their customers. What if something goes wrong with the product? What if there is a breakdown? What if someone doesn't turn up at the agreed time? Often customer service is about planning for the worst: what to do when things turn ugly. If you have a contact number that your customers never have to use, great. But if they have a number that they can call in an emergency, and they have to use it, that is giving them good customer service.
There are couple of points to remember with emergency contact numbers. The customer should understand how to use the number, otherwise it may become their main point of contact. If you are the person who has to answer the phone, this can become a little frustrating. Outline clearly to your customers when the number should be used and in what kind of situations.
If you are going to give someone an emergency number to use for outside of normal hours, make sure that someone is going to answer it. It's no good having the direct telephone number for the President of the United States only to hear when you call it as some disaster threatens, 'Hi, this is the President. I'm not here right now, but leave your name and number and I'll get back to you before the next election.' A tad silly perhaps, but I'm sure you know what I mean. Don't just give out a number in anticipation that it will never be called. Plan for the fact that the number you give out will be called.
This leads to my third point: you need to decide what level of service you want to offer. I couldn't think of anything worse that being on call 24 hours a day, seven days a week, but it's unlikely that there would be a marketing crisis that needed to be handled after hours. I do, however, do a lot of public relations work and some of my clients could find themselves in need of public relations advice after hours. In these cases, they have my after hours contact details should an emergency arise.
If you give out an after hours contact number, don't sound irritated when your customers use it. Recently I was on holiday in a fishing port and I picked up a brochure that offered full-day fishing trips. As I had arrived late in the evening, I thought it would be too late to book a trip for the next day. However, the brochure included a 24-hour booking number, which I rang, only to be lectured on how rude I was to ring at that time of night. I asked the woman why she promoted a 24-hour booking service if she didn't want to offer one, and she had a few more choice words to say. I hung up and booked another boat the next day.