If you are in an industry where it can be very important for your customers, clients, or patients to reach you at any time of the day or night, then you need to have a system in place that allows you to be alerted to special situations that may require you to wake up and go in to work in the middle of the night or go in at any other time that would normally be your time off. Even if you do not have to go in, you may have to make a call to your customer to assist them with whatever it is that they are in need of during off-hours. A 24-hour phone answering service may be your best bet. Here are some of the ways that it would be able to help you: 

You would not end up wasting your time unnecessarily

One way you could run your business is to just have all of the after-hours calls forwarded to your phone. However, you would more than likely quickly find that this is not a good way to go. Doing this would leave you answering your phone to people who could have waited to hear back from you, waking up only to find that someone was expecting to just leave a message, and even being pulled away from something you were in the middle of doing just to find out that it was a wrong number. A 24-hour phone answering service would filter calls for you and take messages for you to answer when you get back to work, and they would get into contact with you if there was an emergency or urgent situation that needed your immediate assistance. 

Your customers would feel more secure

In some industries, such as the medical or veterinary industries, customers (or patients) want to know they can get into contact with you if they need to, even if something happens at night, on the weekend, or even over a holiday break. When your customers know that there is a 24-hour phone answering service they can use to get in touch with you if they need to, they will have more trust in you to give them the care they need. Having the phone answered by a person, even after hours, also helps your business look as if it is more professional and this can help you gain and retain more customers.