“Hindsight is 20/20”. Whoever came up with that saying must have known what a roller coaster year this would be. The onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, along with the peak of hurricane season, has created the need for businesses across the Tampa Bay area to re-evaluate their emergency preparedness plans. The obvious things that come to mind are food, water, and of course loads of toilet paper. Often times the lifeblood of a business such as the internet and phone services are an afterthought. What do you do when your telecom services go down? More importantly, what does your service provider do to ensure your services don’t go down?
PBX-Change was built with business continuity as a cornerstone. When Hurricane Irma pummeled the Florida coast, we were able to redirect all of our clients’ calls proactively to ensure that none of their customers got dead air when reaching out. Even when clients had power outages to their buildings our phone service still worked, allowing their customers to leave voicemails or reroute calls to a mobile device. We helped to put recorded messages in place to inform our clients’ customers of modified business hours and closings. Our support staff even emailed our clients prior to landfall to remind them of steps they could take to be prepared. Our data network had zero downtime due to geographically redundant data centers between Tampa and Atlanta.
As it was with Irma, so it is now. Your customers will never hear the dreaded “the number you have dialed is no longer in service” message. Power backup is always in place through battery-powered arrays and standby generators. Our Customer Service department is based locally and available 24/7 to implement changes as needed. During Irma, only 0.2% of our users had downtime for any significant period.
When the lockdowns started earlier in the year we were able to help thousands of users go remote by providing our mobility software at short notice. While other platforms were being hacked due to security vulnerabilities, our clients had the assurance of knowing Cisco built our software with security as one of the most important factors. End-to-end encryption ensures our clients can focus on running their business instead of being forced to become network security experts. Instant messaging, video conferencing, and the ability to take your business number with you anywhere, supports continuity like never before.
Having a true business partner in your service provider means that all this is put into place before you even know you need it. Being prepared in advance of emergencies means ‘business as usual’ really is an everyday occurrence for PBX-Change clients, regardless of what else is happening in the world. If we can get you through emergency situations without missing a beat, imagine how seamless our service is during normal times.
