What’s the most terrifying word in the business vocabulary? For most organizations, it’s not churn or recession. It’s downtime.
Indeed, “going off the grid” and having no phone system access for any length of time — even a few minutes — isn’t just an inconvenience. It’s a major threat that triggers high costs across four areas:
- Productivity Loss: Employees cannot collaborate with each other or serve customers, which not only reduces productivity — sometimes grinding it to a virtual halt — but it creates a massive backlog of work that must be tackled when power is restored and the phone system (finally) goes back online. A study by Gartner pegged the cost of downtime for enterprises at a whopping $5,600 per minute.
- Wage Loss: Employees still need to be paid their normal salary and benefits, even if they cannot get much done because the phone system is down. While this may be a win for some employees who appreciate a break in the action, it’s a costly loss for business owners who are paying a lot for a little — especially if they need to cover overtime to eliminate the above-noted backlog. Talk about adding insult to injury!
- Customer Loss: Customers who want answers or help get frustrated — and in some cases infuriated — when they can’t contact a business by phone. According to research by American Express, a staggering 33% of customers will switch to a competitor after a single negative experience. Not having their call answered certainly qualifies.
- Reputation Loss: Annoyed customers and ex-customers can inflict significant and lasting reputation damage by writing negative reviews (e.g. “I needed support and couldn’t get through for six hours!”). According to the BrightLocal Consumer Research survey, 91% of customers check online reviews to learn about a business before contacting them. What’s more, several negative reviews can make it harder to recruit talented new employees.
Fortunately, there is a proven and affordable way for businesses of all sizes — including startups and SMBs that are on tight budgets — to avoid the high costs of phone system downtime: switch to Carolina Digital Phone’s cloud telephone system!
Our state-of-the-art cloud telephone system runs on a geographically dispersed cloud infrastructure. In the event of a local power outage, our system automatically shifts to one of three geo-redundant locations that are within fortified data centers, and which are fully powered by battery and generator backups. Most recently, our advanced failover protection sprang into action and supported our customers in September when Hurricane Florence battered the Carolinas.
The bottom line? Business continuity isn’t a nice-to-have. Given the high costs of downtime — comprised of productivity loss, wage loss, customer loss and reputation loss — ensuring that your phone system remains operational 24/7/365 is critical to your success, and essential to your long-term growth.