Essential Services
Our power went out the other day, and as a result our phone system went down as well. It is amazing how the lack of phones will bring producitivity to a halt! Futhermore, we started receiving e-mails (on our blackberries) regarding our customers not being able to reach us.
Now, fortunately, we’ve already planned for a disaster senario similar to this, and we enlisted our phone provider which offered disaster recovery services. In this event, they were able to forward all of our inbound calls to their office where they setup a similar phone system to at least take our calls and drop them to voicemail, which we could then check with our cell phones periodically. That changeover took about 30 minutes to complete – and our power was out for 12 hours! What would that have been like had our phones been down that long.
When was the last time you looked at your customer inbound communication as an essential service, and what plans do you have for recovery should something similar happen to you?
