Your Business Communications Mustn't Suffer Due to Telephony Disasters Next-gen privately hosted telephony systems not only help improve customer satisfaction, through seamless communications

By Piyush Dawar

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While most businesses have a suitable Disaster Recovery plan in place for situations like power cut, hardware malfunctions, software glitches or simply administrative errors, very few cover telephony failures. The DR plan ensures your business operations are back on track as soon as possible. However, an independent survey suggests, the cost of downtime can exceed $100,000 per hour for medium business.

However, most businesses are not prepared for a telephony breakdown. But with the right telephony system, one need not be!

Most businesses these days choose disaster avoidance as their modus operand instead of planning for disaster recovery. With services like hosted or managed, cloud-based, Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) telephony systems that are just what you get. The core systems like the operating hardware and software are located at the telephony service providers' premises so any issues within the office premises won't affect the communication systems.

Furthermore, issues that may creep into your communication system due to glitches at the service providers' end would usually be covered with expensive redundancy systems. Telephony service providers in India guarantee to keep your system running within their SLA (Service level agreement). The best feature about cloud-telephony or hosted systems is that even if any issues crawl into your communication system due to glitches in your premises, the system will automatically reroute the calls to either your mobile phone or a different office location. So, that you can keep receiving and making calls uninhibited.

Next-gen privately hosted telephony systems not only help improve customer satisfaction, through seamless communications. But also, help reduce dependency on the office hardware as end-users or administrators can use the telephony services from anywhere. They also come with other customizable advanced features like voicemail-to-email, CRD logs to track unattended calls, IVR (interactive voice response) systems that help route calls and more. Moreover, these services come with easy to integrate APIs that you can combine with any third party CRM or legacy systems and customize to match your workflow. With cloud telephony services, the workforce is free to work from any location, be it on road or remotely, thus, improving employee morale and productivity.

The death of onsite PBX

Onsite PBX systems are a common sight in most office server rooms where they take up space and are a crucial aspect of business operations. However, the whole system now has become quite aged. They also act as the single point of failure for businesses as communication systems can come crashing down anytime. Also, the fact that they are quite aged will mean that parts would be in their last leg as many would have longer lead times and not be easy to replace or repair. Thus, it is prudent to move to a cloud telephony service provider as it places all the hassles and responsibilities of the provider for a small price to pay.

Choosing the Right Telephony Service Provider

A lot rides on the cloud telephony service providers, as businesses depend on them for their smooth operations. It is crucial to choose the appropriate telephony service provider, as businesses are now global. Any issues that affect a single point can have much larger repercussions. We suggest that businesses opt for a local telephony service provider with a global footprint. Operating with them would be easier, local service providers are usually more responsive than a global firm where the smaller customers are often lower on the list of priorities. Therefore, it is ideal to choose reputable local telephony service providers, as they ensure smooth operations, long term relations and train their account managers as a part of your business.

Piyush Dawar

Co-founder and Director of PRP Services Pvt. Ltd

Piyush Dawar is a Co-founder and Director of PRP Services Pvt. Ltd., a leading Cloud Telephony and Enterprise Messaging solutions provider. He is passionate about to help businesses using hosted telephony technologies. He has practiced almost all the operations from scratch to extreme, belonging to finance, marketing & business development.

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