Telecom Downtime Business Impact

Communications Down

Interruptions to business services can have a major impact on customer and staff morale. Customers' threshold of tolerance of problems with a business service is usually pretty low and staff can get equally frustrated if their ability to work efficiently is affected.

This is true with any area of business activity but particularly with communications. If a potential customer is unable to make contact with a business they will inevitably take their business elsewhere and existing customers will question whether to remain customers.

Continuity of Service Most Businesses will have some kind of recovery plan for a communications outage, even if it's just the phone number of the local telecoms provider or ISP. However this is not sufficient to maintain continuity of services. Lost enquiries has not only a direct and immediate cost but also a long term affect on reputation. Business reputation, staff efficiency and profits will all be affected by any communications outage. To sustain a healthy profile in today's competitive markets, companies need to implement effective DR and communications backup strategies.

Analysis of Business Impact

Discussion on impact to business will be a consequence of the risk analysis process. Once threats to communications have been identified and the likelihood calculated, the impact of any scenario should be assessed.

Areas such as operational losses, recovery costs, staff downtime, lost customers and missed enquiries are followed by regulatory and legal implications, either governmental, or within any contracts such as service level agreements.

With communications down a company may find it difficult to maintain service level agreements depending on how the service is affected, particularly if the outage is extended. In this case penalties may be imposed adding to the costs associated with telecoms downtime.

Contingency Planning

Having established likely causes of telecoms downtime and their impact on business activity and services a suitable recovery and backup plan needs to be developed. Available Telecom Recovery and Backup options need to be assessed whether in-house or via a 3rd party specialist company, with decisions taking into account budgetary considerations.

Telecommunications consultants can assist with the investigation, either making recommendations, or providing the necessary telecom recovery infrastructure. Backup systems can be call diversion to a single number through to complete replication of the in-house phone system including menu prompts, call routing and voicemail.

Recovery Training

Training of staff involved in the telecom recovery process is integral to development of a comprehensive phone system backup solution. Key personnel will need to be updated as changes in company structure necessitate evolution in the recovery plan and the backup systems.

Ancillary services such as VoiceBank Voice Noticeboard Messaging services where emergency information can be accessed via an advertised 'information line' phone number, and TeleConferenceCall Teleconferencing services allowing immediate hookup of key individuals in a phone conference, allowing discussion on the recovery process where internal communications are down, are also worth considering.

Business Continuity the Cheapest Option

With the costs of any loss in business continuity being extensive the decision for a company to invest in a comprehensive telecommunications recovery and backup plan is the cheapest option. Virtual backup systems can be obtained for a fixed monthly fee and can be absorbed into business running costs and are a legitimate deduction both in corporate tax and insurance premiums.