LL - International Calling
When you are making a call to someone outside of the United States or Canada, extra consideration needs to be made regarding how to call, and when.
https://www.howtocallabroad.com
This website allows you to search for the country you want to call, and find additional details related to calling that location.
International shipping has opened our borders to include Canada and Australia so we will find ourselves needing to call these locations and adds to the potential that we'll receive a voicemail. Especially if that call was from Australia who is asleep during the open phone line hours for DML and SCS.
Set yourself up for success when needing to call that customer in the future!
Canada
Canada has 6 time zones but 2 areas share a time for the majority of the year, and is on the North American Dialing Plan which means you will dial 1+area code-prefix-suffix. Example: 15058886666
https://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/canada
British Columbia - Pacific
Alberta - Mountain
Manitoba - Central
Ontario - Eastern
Nova Scotia/Newfoundland - Atlantic
International calls to Australia
To call Australia, their phone number must begin with 61 - which is the country dialing code which tells the phone system what country you are trying to reach. It's possible to connect with a US-based phone number without the addition of the 61 making it seem invalid.
https://www.howtocallabroad.com/australia
https://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/australia
Australia's mainland states and territories are divided into 5 standard time zones. As Western Australia (southeast), Queensland, and the Northern Territory don't use Daylight Saving Time (DST), there are only 3 corresponding DST time zones.
During DST:
Western Australia, Queensland (QLD), Victoria, New South Wales (NSW), and Capital Territory (Melbourne, Sydney, Brisbane) = 6:00 pm - 5:00 am Central / 7:00 am - 6:00 pm PHT
South Australia (Adelaide) = 6:30 pm-5:30 am Central / 7:30 am - 6:30 pm PHT
Western Australia (Perth) = 8:00 pm-7:00 am Central / 9:00 am-8:00 pm PHT
Use this site to help you determine when 9 am-8 pm is in their local time compared to where you are in the world: https://www.worldtimebuddy.com/
Updating the Help Scout Record
When our customers are filling out the phone number portion of the order page, they may or may not include the country code. They may also start the phone number with a 0 or 00. No phone numbers truly start with a 0 or 00 so you will need to remove these when adding the full phone number to their HelpScout customer record.
