Prepare for Disasters with Business VoIP
How can Business VoIP help your organization recover from a disaster? Picture this scenario: the ground is shaking beneath you, water’s racing through the streets, and hurricane winds are pounding on your office windows. In such a situation, your first concern probably isn’t your organization’s phone system. But what about afterward? Once the ground has stopped vibrating, once the water has retreated, once the hurricane has blown itself out, then what happens next? Even if your office building is still standing, you are likely facing power or phone outages. Frustrated customers will find themselves unable to reach you and, in the days, weeks, or even months until service is restored, your business may see its revenue disappear. Such disasters can mean the end of a business, unless it is prepared.
In the event of a disaster, it is essential that a business be able to keep in contact with its customers, employees, and partners. To do this, it is important to have in place a disaster recovery plan to maintain business continuity and prevent loss of revenue. A key cornerstone of such a plan is a Business VoIP phone system that keeps calls flowing regardless of the status of your office.
The way this works is through moving your phone system to the cloud. A VoIP system unifies your communications, including faxes and voicemails, in the cloud and, in doing so, detaches them from the physical location of your office. The phone system is safe in a provider’s network, which should be located separately from your office and have several backups, thereby allowing communications to stay up even if your office is totaled.
A useful feature of VoIP is the ability to forward or reroute calls to another number quickly and easily by simply logging in the web-based control panel. As long as you have an Internet connection, your calls can be set to ring to another office, a mobile phone, or even to home or a hotel room. For disaster recovery plans, this can be set up to allow employees to stay in touch and receive messages either from a backup office or from their own homes. Voicemails and faxes can be checked through an online portal. With plug-and-play IP phones, it’s even possible to remove the phones from your office and use them at another location simply by plugging them in.
Business VoIP has the flexibility to adapt to emergencies and keep your business running no matter what comes at it.