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Florida and its neighboring states are bracing for what may turn out to be the next treacherous hurricane season. After experiencing the 2005 season, every last storm is being watched carefully. The devastating effects of Hurricane Katrina taught many valuable lessons, both to the government as well as to businesses - with the most important being preparation.
Businesses should take a cue from past mistakes, whether it be its own pitfalls or those experienced by others. For a large enterprise, downtime caused by a disaster could result in substantial revenue loss. For a small business or entrepreneur, a few days without generating income could very well mean having to permanently close the doors. |
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| By implementing simple and affordable measures that allow companies to continue business as usual in the event of a major hurricane, businesses can guard against losing customers and profit should a crisis occur. Depending upon the preparedness of the competition, one company's planning may even put it ahead and create a revenue opportunity for it. |
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Effective communication is a key success factor for any business. The vital role of communications is even more magnified in an emergency situation. If the power or phone lines to the office go down, customers are unable to reach employees, and employees are unable to reach one another, disrupting the entire workflow.
Subscribing to a unified communications service as a backup will help solve several, if not all, of a business' communications challenges. Innoport provides businesses with one telephone number for use as a virtual phone and fax system, so employees can continue to answer calls and receive important documents.
If the physical lines are affected, businesses can immediately contact their telecommunications carrier to cut-over the traffic so that all calls forward to the number assigned by us. For businesses with a toll-free number published, they can ask the toll-free provider to change the 'ring-to' number to their Innoport phone number.
Innoport also offers hosted PBX capabilities, which allow businesses to mirror their existing auto attendant, and transfer calls to different departments or employees' extension numbers. If the staff also has the means of accepting calls on their residential telephone lines or on their cell phones, calls can be set up to seamlessly forward to these numbers. Because changes to settings are made through an online interface, businesses can adjust their routing schedules at any time. |
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For example, if an emergency evacuation is ordered as a hurricane approaches, employees will be geographically dispersed as they move further inland. With a hosted PBX system, employees can still work virtually, with complete transparency to the outside!
At a minimum, Innoport can also be used as a voicemail system if all the telephone lines and cell towers in the area are affected. The service allows customers to still connect to the business and messages to be collected.
The same phone number can be used as a fax number, so any faxes to the number will be stored online and sent to a business's email account as an attachment in PDF or TIF format.
The advantages of a unified communications service extends beyond the customer-facing aspect. Coordination between employees is also important to keep business operations running smoothly. For instance, the same voicemail system can be used to take a daily role call. Innoport can also be used as an announcement line or 'hotline', to inform employees of any government-ordered evacuations, or to track the direction a hurricane is moving.
This same information can be sent out as a fax broadcast throughout the company. If a business needs to change its announcements often, we allow recording of greetings over the phone or by using text-to-speech (TTS) technology, whereby you type out your greeting and allow it to be produced by an artificial voice. This is especially helpful if the Internet is the only communications medium available.
Innoport offers all these capabilities with practically no startup investment and at an affordable monthly expenditure to meet a business' communication requirements. Given the affordability, our services level the playing
field so that small businesses can achieve the same degree of contingency planning as a Fortune 500 company.
A top hurricane researcher predicts that the 2007 Atlantic hurricane season will result in 14 named storms and a total of 7 hurricanes. Think ahead and incorporate a unified communications service into your business continuity solution. To make sure your Innoport phone number is readily available, publish the number in your personnel policy handbook or add it to the corporate phone directory. Being prepared this hurricane season will keep your head above water and your business running smoothly.
Click here for more on how Innoport can be employed as a disaster recovery solution.
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