The bottom line is many of your clients are asking for hosted VoIP services and either you have a solid play or they’ll find another avenue to fulfill their needs. At the same time, customers are complaining about decreasing sales and declining disaster recovery budgets. But the importance of preparing to recover your voice systems for unplanned downtime — power outages, acts of God, fires, floods, etc. — does not go away in a downturn. Whether it’s an environment-related catastrophe or small neighborhood blackout, these interruptions can cost your client thousands upon thousands of dollars in lost revenue, potential customer loss and even a reduced corporate image. Unlike most other disaster recovery products, if positioned properly, hosted VoIP is not perceived as an additional cost, but rather a cost savings. So, before you walk away, here some best practices for selling disaster recovery using a hosted VoIP solution.
1. Implement a work-from-home strategy. Most disaster recovery plans are centered around protecting the customer premise that include costly systems at the customer’s location or an alternative hot site, miles away. Most plans have little consideration for the access of technology and personnel to reach the planned recovery site. In an event such as weather, illness, family issue or a regionalized disaster that precludes workers from working in their usual offices, remote office features of hosted VoIP will allow employees to work from home comfortably while not incurring extra costs to your client. A business’s customers will not realize their employees are working from a remote location since dialing and receiving calls remains unchanged. In addition, management does not need to change its process in order to maintain control of their employees. They can monitor exactly what their employees are doing just as if the employees were working from the office using call status monitoring, call reporting and recording, etc.
2. Move call control outside the building. If the call control is maintained in the impacted building, then there are many limitations. Someone needs to be in the building, and someone needs to call a PBX maintenance person. If the local PBX vendor cannot solve the problem, then the fun really begins. Also figure in wait times and hold times with the carrier to rerouting your calls. Hours and days are sometimes a reality! Lost time means lost revenue and added customer frustration. For many who have experienced this situation in the past, it is not too hard to imagine.
The ability to maintain call control out of the building and using a network-based model afforded by hosted VoIP immediately can satisfy most telecommunications continuity needs. But the real value is giving the company (or its IT department) maximum control over the telephony infrastructure outside and inside their demarcation point. With this added control, your client will never miss a call since users can reroute any incoming calls to cell phones, home office numbers, recovery sites or wherever they choose and, most importantly, whenever they choose.
