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Posts Tagged ‘telecommunications’

Business Continuity & Disaster Recovery

Two terms that are bandied about frequently in today’s turbulent times, and for good reason. 

Recent research carried out in conjunction with YouGov showed that businesses are losing an average of £14,000.00 per annum in lost revenue’s owing to being without telephone’s for just one day, and possibly even more worrying is that 60% of the 2,500 businesses polled have no alternative method for customers or suppliers to contact them during times of phone outage.

The research was designed to investigate how prepared organisations are for interruption to their phone service. Telephones still remain key to most organisations for communicating with its customers, taking orders or support enquiries for example, yet surprisingly few businesses have any form of contingency plan in place for how they will continue serving their customers if the phone is not available.

So thats the doom and gloom out of the way. The question is, what can be done to prepare ourselves as businesses against this recurring problem?

There are of course a number of answers, if your business has more than one site, you could set up diversions on telephone lines to an alternative site where by you can continue to service your customers, of course there are drawbacks to this, such as the increased workload on your staff, and the cost of diverting calls, essentially meaning you carry the cost of the diverted portion of the call, which while less than ideal, may get you through the problem.

But what if you dont have the luxury of a second site to divert calls to? Or what if the problem is not due to a lack of phone service into a site, but perhaps actually you have lost access to a site altogether, due to a whole myriad of possibilities, such as staff illness, loss of access to building due to a flooded water-main perhaps….. then what?

Hosted Telephony can resolve the issue in all of these instances, and many more. Hosted telephony is considered an emerging technology, despite the fact that it has actually been available for more than 5 years. Hosted is delivered via SIP (Session Initiated Protocol) which essentially removes the need to have a traditional telephone system, and traditional telephone lines installed on site.

By running a hosted telephony system in your business, your telephone system is actually housed by us, in a data centre.  You therefore simply require the telephone handsets to go on your desk. The handsets are connected to an internet connection, and are programmed to automatically look for our telephone system whenever they are connected to it. The beauty of this being that should a site become inaccessible, the hosted extensions (i.e. your employees telephone’s) can be delivered anywhere with an internet connection, and if they dont want to cart their handset home each night, we can install a ‘softphone client’ on their PC/Laptop enabling them to work from home, hotel, or anywhere else with an internet connection.

Such is our confidence that hosted telephony can assist with pretty much any telephony related problem, we welcome your comments on this blog. Perhaps you have experienced an issue in the past, or have been looking into Business Continuity and have a few scenario’s that you’ve considered? If so, please do send us the details of such incidences, and we will happily give you information specific to your scenario to explain how hosted could help in the event of  such an incident.