Unexpected things can happen and this is when your Business will either sink or swim, but why not let your business be the one to shine through??

With the best will in the world you can never plan for every eventuality – no matter how much you try, but you can certainly be prepared for as many as possible. I know you, always think it will never happen to you but the statistics really speak for themselves; 35% of outages are caused by natural disasters and 45% are operational.

The reason for having Disaster Recovery in place is for the business to continue operating to close as normal as possible in the event something should affect it.

Reduce the effect on your customers
If your business relies heavily on your customer service and this is what makes you stand out from the crowd then you really must have something in place should your customers be affected. It can take years for a company’s reputation to be build, but unfortunately it can take only one issue to destroy it.
By making sure your customers can contact you ensures your customers can be assisted, listened to and reassured regarding their service. Depending on the issue they may not even be aware of anything if they are able to contact you in the usual way.

Have the ability to move across locations
Any business needs to have the flexibility to be able to work from a different location. If something has happened at your usual businesses premises you need to be able to set up and work form a different location. This ensures you workers are in a safe environment and your business can continue. I appreciate you are not going to keep another office sitting there without anyone in it, for those just in case moments, but having the flexibility to be able work from dual locations even if this is from home.

Communication is key
When disaster happens, its very easy to become insular when trying to fix the issue, but you must think outwardly too. This can be a prime opportunity for your competitors to go full throttle and try and obtain as many of your customers as possible.
I don’t think in todays world anyone expects everything to be at 100% all of time, the most frustrating thing for any customer is not being kept in loop. If you are experiencing an issue with your service make sure you maintain communication with your customers, whether it’s a phone call to update them or a service update email every couple of hours. Every company is good when the service is operating as it should, but it’s the great companies that stand out when disaster strikes and they put their customers first.

How SwitchboardFREE can help you with disaster recover
SwitchboardFREE is a business class product and is highly reliable and resilient. It is designed and built to serve the needs of high volume users and currently over 78,000 businesses have signed up for an account with us. The call quality is always of the highest audio level and that the quality of each call is constant. Our solution is always good quality and offers the level of reliability a professional business needs. Our state of the art Soft Switch is co-located in London and is connected with a number of tier 1 carriers including BT, Virgin and Cable and Wireless. Our infrastructure is dual redundant and we boast a consistently high uptime of 99.9% to keep your business running smoothly. We have a team of dedicated in-house technical staff who monitor and maintain our systems 365 days a year.

If you’re experiencing IT or telephony issues or you’re unable to get to the office, for example, you can instantly change the destination number of your inbound calls to a different location or to your mobile to ensure that you never miss any calls. Other useful features include:
the ‘quick-close’ feature whereby you can close your lines at the touch of a button directing your calls to a custom out-of-hours message, we will send the voicemail and missed call emails to your email address in the event of missing a call, meaning you can call them right back. Plus the ability to set up another number instantly if required in an emergency

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