The Enquiries That Arrive While You Are Closed
Christmas 2026 gives most UK service businesses a nine day gap. The enquiries keep arriving. What to set up in November so January buys them.
Christmas Day 2026 is a Friday. Boxing Day falls on the Saturday, so the substitute bank holiday is Monday 28 December, and New Year's Day is the following Friday, 1 January 2027. In Scotland there is a further substitute day on Monday 4 January.
Put a normal shutdown around those dates and most UK service businesses are effectively shut from Thursday 24 December to Monday 4 January. Nine working days, most of them not bank holidays, during which nobody is in the office and the enquiry form is still live.
Those enquiries are the most valuable of the year, and they get the worst service a business offers all year. That is the whole problem, and it is fixable in an afternoon in November.
Why the Christmas gap behaves differently from a summer one
Everybody shuts in August too, and nobody worries about it in the same way. Three things make the Christmas gap worse.
The person enquiring is not on holiday. Someone deciding in the quiet week between Christmas and New Year to sort out their back, their accounts, their child's maths or their fitness is doing it precisely because they have time to think. They are motivated and they are shopping. In August the enquirer is usually also away, so a slow reply costs less.
They are comparing more providers than usual. January enquiries are decided rather than scheduled: the person has resolved to do a thing and has no existing relationship with anybody. We went through that difference in the January rush checklist. Over the shutdown, the comparison set is whoever replies.
Nine days is long enough to forget. A reply on 5 January to an enquiry sent on 27 December reaches someone who has either booked elsewhere or lost the impulse. The enquiry is not cold, it is gone.
The mistake is the auto-reply, not the closure
Closing is fine. Every small business closes. The damage is done by what the enquirer receives in the meantime, and almost every out of office makes the same three errors.
It tells them you are closed. It does not tell them when you reopen in a way they can act on. And it asks nothing, so the conversation ends there and has to be restarted by you, from a standing start, in January.
Compare those two messages.
| The usual auto-reply | What it should do instead |
|---|---|
| Thanks for your message. The office is closed for the Christmas period and we will respond on our return. | Thanks, I have got this. I am back on Tuesday 5 January and you are second in the queue. So I can come back with something useful rather than a diary invitation, two quick things: what are you hoping to sort out, and are mornings or evenings easier? |
The second one does three jobs. It confirms a human will deal with it. It gives a specific date rather than "our return". And it asks two questions, which means that when you open your laptop on 5 January a proportion of your enquiries have already told you what they want and when they are free.
That is the difference between a January inbox of twenty messages saying "hi, is anyone there" and twenty messages you can book from.
The five things worth setting up, in order
1. Decide and publish your actual reopening date
Pick the day and put it in three places: the auto-reply, the website, and your Google Business Profile hours. The profile one matters more than people expect, because a business showing as open when it is not generates calls that go unanswered, and an unanswered call is a worse outcome than a closed sign.
Be slightly pessimistic. A reopening date of 5 January that you actually honour beats one of 2 January that slips to the 6th.
2. Rewrite the auto-reply so it asks something
Two questions, no more. What do you want to sort out, and when are you free. Anything longer reads as a form and gets ignored.
If your enquiry form already captures those, say so and ask the one thing it does not: a sentence on the situation in their own words. That sentence is what lets you reply on day one with a recommendation rather than a request for information.
3. Make sure the enquiries land somewhere you will find them
This is the one that actually loses the money. An enquiry that arrives as an email to an inbox you are not reading is an enquiry that is sitting below eleven days of newsletters on 5 January.
If enquiries land in a CRM, they are a list with a status, and the list is still there in January whatever happened to the inbox. If they land in email, they are indistinguishable from everything else that arrived while you were away. We covered the mechanics of getting off email and spreadsheets in moving your client spreadsheet into a CRM.
4. Set one window to check, and tell people about it
Not monitoring the inbox is reasonable. Monitoring it constantly over Christmas is how people end up not having a Christmas. The middle option works better than either: one slot, say an hour on 29 or 30 December, stated in the auto-reply.
"I will check messages once on 30 December" is an honest promise you can keep, and it converts the handful of enquirers who were going to decide that week anyway. It also means the enquiries from 24 to 29 December get a real reply inside a week rather than inside a fortnight.
5. Write the January first morning sequence now
Decide in November what happens at 9am on your first day back, because you will not decide it well on the day.
Something like: work the enquiry list oldest first, not newest first, because the oldest has waited longest and is closest to going elsewhere. Reply to every one before you do anything else, including ones you think are a poor fit. Offer a specific slot rather than asking for availability, because you already asked that in the auto-reply.
Oldest first is counterintuitive and it is right. The newest enquiry can wait a day. The one from 27 December cannot.
What not to bother with
Two things that look like good ideas and are not.
A Christmas offer in the auto-reply. Somebody enquiring on 29 December has already decided to buy something; discounting to them is giving away margin you did not need to spend. Save the offer for the people who did not enquire.
Pretending to be open. Scheduling replies to go out at 9am on 29 December as though you were working is a short-term win and a long-term problem, because the next message takes four days and the enquirer now has a false baseline for how fast you are. A stated closure that you keep to builds more trust than a fake presence.
The arithmetic, roughly
Work out what one new client is worth to you over a year. For most of the service businesses we work with, a tutor, a clinic, a trainer, a bookkeeper, that is somewhere between a few hundred and a few thousand pounds.
Now ask how many enquiries arrive in a normal nine day stretch. Even at a quiet rate of one every other day, that is four or five over the shutdown, arriving from people who are actively comparing providers. Converting two instead of one pays for every CRM and website decision you will make next year.
The work to get there is about two hours in November: one reopening date, one rewritten auto-reply, one check whether enquiries land somewhere you will see them, and one sentence about what you do on the first morning back.
Which is the point of doing it now rather than on 23 December, when it will be the last thing on a list of forty.
Frequently asked questions
When are the Christmas 2026 bank holidays?
In England and Wales: Christmas Day on Friday 25 December 2026, the Boxing Day substitute on Monday 28 December, and New Year's Day on Friday 1 January 2027. Scotland has the same three plus a 2nd January substitute day on Monday 4 January.
Should I keep answering enquiries over Christmas?
Not continuously. One stated check, for example an hour on 30 December, converts the people who were going to decide that week and still leaves you a holiday. Promising to monitor the inbox and then not doing it is worse than closing properly.
What should a Christmas out of office actually say?
Three things: that a human has the message, the specific date you are back, and two questions, what they want to sort out and when they are free. The questions are the part most auto-replies leave out, and they are what make your first morning back productive.
Which enquiry should I answer first in January?
The oldest. The person who enquired on 27 December has waited longest and is closest to booking somewhere else. Working newest first feels natural and loses exactly the enquiries that were most motivated.
Is it worth putting an offer in the auto-reply?
No. Someone who enquires during a shutdown has already decided to buy. Discounting to them gives away margin you did not need to spend, and the offer is better aimed at people who have not enquired.
How many enquiries does a typical small business get over the shutdown?
That depends entirely on your traffic, which is why the thing to do is look at last year's figures rather than take anybody's average. Count the enquiries that arrived between 24 December and 4 January, and count how many of them became clients. The second number is usually the surprise.
Bank holiday dates above are from GOV.UK, and they differ between England and Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland, so check your own.
If you want enquiries landing in something that still holds them in January, Kabooly CRM is built for exactly this size of business. Or read why small businesses need a CRM first.