What’s Your VoIP Business Continuity Plan?
Business continuity planning is a critical practice many businesses can often overlook. Without a plan in place to thwart network downtime and to stay connected to important clients and contacts, companies are putting themselves at unnecessary risk for unplanned expenses, significant loss of business, and serious damage to reputation.
Luckily, VoIP business continuity planning plays a critical role in a company’s overall resiliency and disaster recovery efforts—allowing them to stay connected to critical business contacts, clients, and customers so they can completely minimize the damaging effects and high costs associated with network downtime.
Geo-redundant Hosting Server Deployments
One of the main ways VoIP is so important to a proper continuity plan is because of the strategic placement of the servers that host the VoIP network. Since the hosting servers are geographically distributed across the country in strategic, low-risk locations, companies investing in a hosted VoIP service experience network uptimes exceeding 99.99%—ensuring they’re always in contact, regardless of the setback.
If one of the hosting servers loses power from a storm, security breach, or any other disastrous reason, for example, the next closest hosting server group takes on the workload and keeps the phone lines online to completely maximize uptime and avoid time spent out of contact.
24/7/365 US-based Support
In the event a company does have any issue with their connectivity, a team of US-based VoIP support specialists is available around the clock each day of the year to walk them through any issues they may be having. With this generous coverage, companies are able to avoid any obstacle that may hinder contact with important contacts as soon as they occur at any time—even on nights, weekends, and holidays.
Highlighted VoIP Business Continuity Features
Hosted VoIP plans typically have a wide array of PBX features that make business continuity planning possible. Below is a small handful of VoIP features that help businesses and their employees stay prepared for any setback:
- Hunt Groups – Hunt groups are a set of stations (users) that receive incoming phone calls—either simultaneously or in sequence—until the call is answered. This means that if one or more employee is unavailable for any reason to answer an important call, for example, another individual will be able to available to ensure the call gets through.
- Time-based call routing – Time-based call routing allows businesses to reroute calls intended for a closed company branch to call a company branch still open instead. While not technically a disaster recovery method, this feature ensures companies decrease their chance of missing important information, a potential sale, or any other useful call due to a branch being closed for the evening.
- Call forwarding – Similar to time-based call routing, call forwarding (both for the enterprise and an individual employee) ensures calls get routed to the appropriate number or branch if there’s any issue connecting to the intended number or contact. With “Always”, “Busy”, “No Answer”, “Selective”, and “Not Reachable” conditions under which a call can be redirected, companies have the necessary tools to fully maximize the reachability of every employee.
- Mobile app – Using a VoIP mobile app, employees are able to turn their personal smart devices into an office phone they can take anywhere. Employees log into the app and will then be able to make and receive calls using their own business number. This means that any call directed to an out-of-office employee won’t go to voicemail; rather, the call will ring the employee’s smart phone or tablet wherever they may be in the world. Additionally, the VoIP app will have an array of powerful communication tools, such as Instant Messaging, video call capabilities, and in-call controls that allows the employee to customize his or her communications experience the exact way he or she prefers it—maximizing the productivity and availability for each company employee.