Small to mid sized businesses that are busy and growing fast cannot afford to have their phone systems fail them every time a major winter storm rolls into the area. The logistics involved in losing whole work days to the weather are cost-prohibitive. The loss of potential and existing clients, the dissatisfaction of clients who are forced to wait many hours for service, and the inability to communicate with staff and business partners all add up to a major drain on your company’s resources.
The best way to circumvent the weather and keep your business phone lines continuously operational is to install or upgrade to a business VoIP phone system. Theses systems use the latest digital technology to allow you to process your calls through the Internet rather than a switchboard.
Some of the most important benefits of a VoIP system include:
- Affordability: These systems can save you as much as 40% on local calls and up to 90% on international calls.
- Conferencing: You can not only do conference calls, but the number of lines that can be involved is substantially higher due to VoIP’s use of compressed data transfers.
- Special Features: VoIP brings an abundance of special features, including caller ID with last names, speed dialing, call blocking, enhanced voice mail, contact lists, call waiting and forwarding, and last number re-dial.
Besides all this, however, VoIP can also minimize, nearly eliminate really, the possibility of missing calls due to extreme winter weather. Some of the ways that this is accomplished include:
- Built-in “Redundancy:” This means that, should the primary data-route be temporarily down, calls will be automatically re-routed to a back-up path.
- Load-Balancing: This refers to the ability of many VoIP systems to handle heavy data usage during a holiday, an emergency, a sale, or for any other reason. “Excess” load is simply automatically re-routed to alleviate high traffic.
- Total Mobility: Instead of shutting down when a blizzard is forecast or when one unexpectedly appears, you can simply have employees take their VoIP phones home and continue to work there. As long as there is Internet access, the phones will function, and as long as background noise is controlled, the user on the other end will never know the phone’s location.
- Cloud-Based: Since data is stored in an online cloud, it is always accessible from any location. This enables anywhere-to-anywhere calling, but it also keeps data safely unaffected by local weather patterns. Special functions like transferring calls to employees, dial by four-digit extension, and long-distance video-conferencing will also continue to work during a storm.
If your business is located in Connecticut or New England, one of the best service providers to install a VoIP phone system at your business is TRICOM Systems. TRICOM has been in the business for 40 years. They use only industry-leading hardware from Nortel and Avaya, and they know how to customize phone systems to fit each business’s needs. TRICOM can make your business communications more effective, more affordable, and immune to local weather patterns.
