It’s snowing! As soon as the heavens opened this lunchtime, we got talking in our Cheshire office about those of us who love the snow and others that dread the thought of driving home in it.
As business owners though, we know bad weather can be incredibly disruptive. It is really important to ensure your business is protected against the seasonal elements, and hosted telephony can massively help you do this.
Bad weather can test a company’s infrastructure to breaking point, often wreaking havoc on corporate communications. From broken phone lines to power cuts, a company’s hardwired communication systems are uniquely vulnerable to outside events.
That’s before considering the impact of heavy snow or storms on employee attendance.
Failure to prepare is to prepare to fail
During adverse weather, maintaining normal channels of communication between staff and with customers is absolutely essential for productivity and client relations, which can suffer greatly from downtime or disruption.
While your offices are being battered by snow and blizzards, customers elsewhere could be enjoying normal working conditions – and so could your competitors.
According to a recent report by The FSB, two thirds of small businesses say they have been negatively affected by severe weather in the last three years.
Remote control
It is critical to have a robust phone system in place, courtesy of a cloud based unified communications provider, allowing your business to maintain full productivity in the event of any unforeseen disruptions.
A solution is now available, hosted telephony, which is remote or flexible working via cloud-based telephony.
Rather than relying on fixed phone lines, which can become damaged or disconnected by storms, or made inaccessible by snow, a hosted phone system moves fixed and mobile telephony to the cloud.
With pioneering hosted phone systems eliminating the need for comms rooms, managed networks can keep your company operating at full efficiency, while less well-prepared competitors flounder in heavy snow.
As the next generation of communications management, SIP can fully future-proof your company’s telephony.
The advantages of these hosted phone system packages are numerous:
- It’s cloud based, and therefore unaffected by weather conditions.
- Employees can access their phone services from anywhere, on any device.
- Complete flexibility and scalability.
- The simplicity of communications and software systems allows even technology-averse employees to easily navigate its dedicated web portal.
- Hosted phone systems are here long-term and can be cheaper and more reliable than legacy PBX systems.
No place like home
Letting staff work from home brings many advantages, but it’s always better to plan for this eventuality in advance. With the right infrastructure, your staff can be just as productive as they would be in the of office and, more importantly, customers won’t even notice the difference:
- Clients won’t know that an employee is based at home, because their work phone number will appear the same, whether they’re calling from Hertfordshire or the Highlands of Scotland.
- Home-working frees up time for more productive activities that would otherwise have been spent commuting.
- Administrators can configure and manage the system in real-time from wherever they happen to be working (or stranded), in response to changing demands.
Continuity announcements
One sure fire way to maximise business continuity is to appoint a unified communications provider – a specialist organisation that can handle all aspects of your business phone systems.
A hosted phone system package minimises downtime because any problem will be resolved by one company, avoiding the nightmare scenario where line and network providers blame each other for a fault, rather than facilitating repairs.
The best unified communications providers will deliver flexible and responsive personal service around the clock, helping employees to familiarise themselves with the web portal interface of a hosted phone system.
Call us today on 0333 009 0836 to find out how hosted telephony systems can help you!
