How To Protect Your Telephone Service When There's A Business Interruption

A number of circumstances can take down a voice system. Natural disasters, power outages, fires, fiber cuts, and PBX malfunctions, to name a few. Any of these events can drastically reduce your ability to serve your customers. Worse – many businesses have no idea how much an hour of down time costs them in terms of hard and soft dollars. InContact provides a continuity plan that keeps your telecommunications up and your business in touch with its customers – at a cost that is affordable.

What about opportunity costs?

What about the cost to your reputation?

Thinking Through the Problem

If you wait until disaster strikes, thinking your carrier can re-route your phone traffic with little notice - think again. If you figure your PBX will transfer calls to an off-site number - what if the PBX is out of service?

Outbound calls don’t present much of a problem…usually. Outbound calls can be made from cell phones, hotel phones or home phones. However, if the disaster is widespread, outbound service could become a challenge. Inbound calls to toll free numbers are typically easily addressed. Those can be re-routed by your long distance carrier, in fairly short order, especially if alternate routing paths are arranged in advance with your carrier.

The Show-Stopper: Re-Routing Local Inbound
The big challenge, however, is how to handle local numbers, especially direct inward dial or DID service. Depending on who your local service provider is and the type of phone service you have, most local providers offer a re-direct service for local numbers.

The catch
You have to know - in advance - where you want the local numbers to ring to. Not a problem, if you have a recovery facility under contract. Well, actually it can be a problem even if you have a recovery facility in mind. Most standard "hot site" agreements contain provisions whereby telephone numbers will be assigned when the client declares an emergency. It’s possible to negotiate for a block of numbers in advance, but, since the recovery facility has to dedicate the numbers to you and not share them among all their clients, the cost for reserving those numbers is usually very high.

But what if you want the flexibility to send your people to a hotel or a sister facility, or even to their homes to work? How can you possibly design a plan that gives you this kind of ultimate flexibility, enabling the business to react as the situation dictates?

The Solution: Maximum Flexibility, Minimum Costs, Unlimited Options
A "virtual" ACD/IVR, combined with pre-planned, local call re-directing should be a part of every company’s disaster recovery plan. What you should be seeking is a solution where your local calls are routed to a pre-defined, static, toll free number that rings into a very flexible, network-based platform. This approach will give the company unlimited options regarding how inbound calls can then be re-directed. Your employees can be sent anywhere in the country and still get their calls. All they need is a telephone.

There are a few network-based systems that will provide virtual ACD/IVR functionality, some more effectively than others. It’s not the point of this paper to endorse a particular solution, but as a business continuity planner, it is in your best interest to find a solution that includes a robust feature set like interactive voice response (IVR), music on hold, ability to route a call to a home phone, a mobile phone or a remote office phone. After all, the whole reason for implementing a virtual ACD/IVR is to give you the features and functionality that you want and need, not force you into a solution that makes you change the way you process calls.

And be sure to find someone to support you in your endeavor. Designing and configuring a solution that will give your callers no idea that you’re having a problem with your telephones is complex. Not expensive, but like most business issues, the details have to be implemented correctly in order for the objective to be met.

A virtual ACD/IVR solution benefits most any business operation, large or small, enabling workers or call center agents to be dispersed anywhere in the country.

In today’s hyper-competitive environment, you simply can’t afford the risk of losing your phone service without a recovery plan. Using a "virtual" ACD/IVR as a part of your solution will eliminate that feeling of panic – should the day come when you receive that dreaded call.

Don’t wait any longer to improve the quality of each customer contact experience and the productivity of those who handle each contact.

To learn more about how VoiceConX can help your business take advantage of the services we offer, please contact us today.