Utilizing an omni-channel customer service is a becoming more and more important in the corporate world. Companies are looking to text, email, chat, and automated systems to deliver a better customer experience. All of these channels can be useful in retaining customers and building loyalty. Too many brands, though, aren’t paying attention to the most important customer channel they have: their phone system.
Despite companies’ attempts to guide customers towards different ways of contacting them, most consumers still pick up the phone when they need help. According to Forrester, the phone is still the most widely used customer service channel, with 73% of consumers preferring it. When customers are angry, they’re even more motivated to pick up the phone. Customers are actually 11x more likely to call when they are upset or frustrated, says a report from Arizona State University.
These stats make it clear that phone is still the most important channel for customer service. Because of this, your phones need to stay up and running! CallHarbor understands that there’s never a good time for downtime, so we make sure it doesn’t happen. Let’s take a look at why your old system is more prone to downtime, how the cloud avoids this, and what our business does to ensure your system stays working.
Legacy systems are more likely to experience outages & downtime
Many companies have begun to look at VoIP and UCaaS systems for a more reliable and stable solution. Cloud system offer a stable uptime when it comes to your solution. On-premise systems encounter downtime for many reasons. Whether it’s a weather-related outage, a disruption within the technology itself, or a global pandemic that mandates remote work, legacy, on-premises systems are often left vulnerable due to architecture and/or system inflexibility. Without a redundant environment to failover to, the downtime will be felt operationally and financially. Some of these impacts are short-term, but the effects can also be long lasting. With cloud systems, you can there is always still a way to handle phone calls and communications.
With an on-premise phone system or contact center, there is no backup plan. If anything goes down, it is truly down. Troubleshooting underlying issues and performing root cause analysis takes time. Downtime can mean lost money, lost opportunity, and unhappy customers. It puts a pause on business, and takes away time that your company cannot get back.
Cloud systems mean business continuity, not downtime
Having multiple points of presence and being able to offer redundancy when it comes to your hosted voice solution is extremely important. Redundancy is key, and we understand that. We always plan for the unexpected, and we plan to keep your organization’s phone system up and running. With our multiple geo-redundant locations in Detroit, Atlanta, and Phoenix, you can rest assured that we will keep your phones ringing, your data safe, and provide low latency no matter where you are located.
All of our point of presence are in sync with each other ensuring that you are not reliant on one location. If one location, say the data center in Detroit, experiences a disaster, communications and processes can be rerouted to a redundant data center located in Atlanta, where the geographical disaster is not occurring. Of course, the more data centers the better — this ensures not only a higher level of redundancy, but better connections for users across the country.
UCaaS solutions have a natural design for disaster avoidance, more-so than recovery. You can access Cloud solutions from anywhere, and they are engineered for redundancy from the very start. Redundancy is a major factor when it comes to the overall reliability and quality of service offered from a UCaaS provider. It is something that will make your phone system much more reliable.
Continue to stay connected – no matter what
In the event of any outage – such as power or internet, we have ways to keep you connected. Though your physical phones will be down in the office, here are a few different options you have to keep the calls coming. These three things will make sure your business calls are up and running in no time.
Switch to mobile app or web softphone
CallHarbor includes our mobile app and our browser-based web softphone in the cost of every user. That means every user gets access to these two features that make it possible to work from anywhere. Both of these options give you access to your business phone number from wherever you need to be. Having full accessibility of your contacts, voicemails, inbound/outbound calling all while utilizing your business phone number is a huge perk.
The CallHarbor Mobile app allows you to take your business extension with you. You can place calls, receive calls, adjust answering rules, and check voicemail. Send chat + SMS, and view the status of your other staff members right from your mobile phone. You simply login with your existing CallHarbor portal login and instantly access your extension and personalized settings.
A web softphone is a phone or feature for making telephone calls over the Internet using a computer. This avoids having to use your dedicated phone hardware. The softphone can be utilized through our internet web portal on a desktop, mobile device, or other computer, and also functions in the same way as our web softphone on the mobile app. It allows the user to place and receive calls, see their coworkers’ online status, and engage in chat and SMS. Read more about how to utilize our web softphone here.
Bring your phone home with you
Our hardware offering has a wide range of business desk phones. Some of those offerings have WiFi capabilities, meaning all they need is a WiFi connection to work as usual – no wiring required! This is an extremely convenient option for employees that work between home and the office, because they can simply unplug their desk phone and plug it back in and connect to WiFi to work as normal. If you come into the office and realize the power is out, you actually have the option of grabbing your desk phone and taking it home for the day.
Set up call forwarding to another phone
Another option we have is to simply forward all of your calls to a different number, location, or phone. The best part about this is that you can simply call our support team and we can do it for you on the fly. You’re already stressed due to your power outage, so we want to make it as easy as possible on you! If you have multiple locations to your business and only one location is dealing with the power outage, you can forward all of your calls to your calls to a different location. In this case, you could also simply adjust your auto attendant to let callers know you are closed for the day due to a power outage, and to try location X by calling (123)-456-7890.
Set up automatic call forwarding when unavailable
Another option you have the ability to setup before something such as a weather emergency or power outage happens is to have your system itself already prepared to forward calls when you are unavailable.