Phone systems are an important means of communication, and if your system fails, no matter for how long, your business will be impacted negatively. Even once the system is back up and running, your business will need to repair relationships and budget in repair costs. Just as you do for your data network, your business should have a failover solution, such as SIP Trunking, for your voice network. Here are 10 things that can go wrong if your phone system goes down:
1. Reputation – When your business is unreachable or customers are met with “this line is disconnected”, your reputation is sure to be impacted.
2. Loss of Revenue – If calls cannot be made to clients or the line goes dead during an important call, your business could potentially lose clients or miss out on closing important deals.
3. IT Costs – When your IT team has to neglect other projects to service the phone system failure, or you must outsource the service, you’ll be faced with large costs to get back up and running.
4. Customer Service – If clients or customers call to solve a problem and are unable to get through to a customer service representative, they will lose faith in your business’s ability to address customer service issues.
5. Employee Productivity – Your employees’ means of communication has failed, which ultimately stops their workflow. If employee productivity is delayed, your business is unable to grow.
6. Loss of Data – Sometimes data can be lost if your system fails, which will cost your business time and money to recover.
7. Frustrated Employees – Of course clients will be frustrated, but employees who have to manage the follow up crisis communication will also be frustrated with the added workload.
8. Equipment Replacement – If your phone system fails and IT is unable to recover, you may have to pay an up front costly expense to replace the necessary equipment, or make a quick decision without the proper research.
9. Loss of Potential Customers – Dropped sales calls, conference calls and cold calls can all lead to the loss of potential paying customers. Additionally, sales people aren’t known for their patience in these matters.
10. Overtime Costs – If your system fails at the beginning or mid business day, there’s a chance IT and employees will have to work overtime to make up for lost work hours.
Just as you have backup and recovery plans in place for your data network in your Business Continuity Plans, so should you consider your voice network in Disaster Recovery Planning. A SIP Trunking solution is low cost and allows you to have a separate Voice over IP Solution that can be used in the case of a POTS line outage. Or a complete transition to SIP trunking for your main line can move your business off of expensive PSTN calling plans, using them only in the case of failover. There are plenty scenarios and things that can go wrong if your phone system goes down and AltiGen Communications has the advice and solutions you need to ensure that never happens. Learn more about SIP Trunking for business continuity HERE.