When your phone system initially crashes, alarms don’t go off to alert you. A large red flashing light doesn’t catch everyone’s attention. Employee computer screens don’t display “ALERT” in big bold letters. Instead, you and your employees sit there, working as you would normally, unaware of the customers desperate to reach your support desk, or prospects eager to discuss a sales opportunity. It is not until someone in your office picks up a dead phone line, or receives a text from their mother who was trying to call their desk phone, that you realize you are down. For how long? How many customers did you anger? How many opportunities for new sales did you miss? Did your CEO get cut off in the middle of an important conference call? Your business continuity plan must take into consideration your phone lines, whether you choose to use a SIP Trunking solution as backup to your POTS lines, or vice versa, otherwise, your entire business will be impacted during an outage.
When a phone system crashes, even if it’s only for a short time, your business will experience fall out. If your phone system crashes, how will consumers define your business and your ability to provide goods and services? Here’s what happens to every moving part of your business if your phone system crashes.
Potential and New Customers – First impressions are everything when making sales and courting new leads. Imagine how many calls you receive a day. Now imagine all those callers being met with the message “this line has been disconnected.” Some of those callers may give your business the benefit of the doubt, but a majority of them will move on and call the competitor.
Sales Team – Whether it be dropped calls between the sales team and clients, or delay in response on a new lead, a failed phone system will effect your sales team negatively. Loss of communication means loss of revenue, plus overtime costs for employees who have to make up for lost time during the day when the phone system was down.
Customer Service – Reputation is key, no matter the industry your business is involved in. Reputation attracts new customers and keeps current customers loyal. If your business is unreachable for hours or even days, your reputation in the industry is sure to be effected. Would you think of a business as reputable if you couldn’t contact them by phone?
IT – IT costs will run high when your IT team has to neglect other projects to service the phone system failure. Before things are up and running again, you’ll be paying high costs in time and money.
Human Resources – While crisis communication is their specialty, their vital time and energy will be wasted scrambling to pick up the pieces after the fall out. Between frustrated customers and employees, HR will exhaust themselves in order to make sure employee productivity gets back on track and customers remain faithful to your brand.
Communication is the means in which any business operates. Just like you have backup plans and disaster recovery for other assets in your company, you should formulate a plan for not if, but when your phone system crashes. 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.