Posted 5/24/11 By Dan Baldwin, ATEL Sales Director, 800-500-ATEL
As a telecom agent, it's my job to help my business customers choose the right voice and data telecom solutions for business. They already know that there's about a half dozen or so main phone companies to choose from, my job is to help them pick the right one, at the right price to match up to their needed telecom applications and "business phone service outage" risk tolerance.
"Business phone service outage", you ask? Yes, believe it or not, in an age where your business phone service can ring simultaneously on three different devices and migrate smoothly from an instant message to a voice call to a video phone conference, your ability to make or receive a business phone call can simply stop entirely in the middle of a business day for your whole company as it has recently for many larger business phone companies including TelePacific Communications and Freedom Voice.
While my business clients and prospects want to know which providers are best for all the new high-demand business telecom "whistles and bells", they also want to believe that I'm doing everything needed to PREVENT or MINIMIZE their business phone service outages by A.) only recommending those carriers that are least likely to go down, and B.) putting some sort of "voice fail over plan" in place that kicks in when the primary voice communications carrier does go down.
To prevent or minimize outages and create believable fail over plans for their business clients though, telecom agents need to have already done plenty of homework to be able to make proper recommendations to business clients that match the client's desire for price appropriate features without undue risk. To make all this happen I use the following five point checklist to help all my business clients prevent or minimize their next business phone service outage.
The Business Phone News Checklist to Prevent or Minimize Your Next Business Phone Service Outage
1. Understand What Caused Recent Business Phone Outages
If you don't know what caused recent outages, preventing the next one is impossible. When I was assigned to a ship in the Navy, "safety rule number one" stated that when something bad happens on a ship (someone gets injured or equipment is damaged), the "bad thing" is never categorized as an "accident" but some sort of "preventable mishap".
TelePacific's own business continuity information sheet states that no outage is 100% preventable but knowing where the weak links are is a key to prevention. See the image below to see where mishaps can occur identified as the areas under the 5 red letters.
