Every business loses its internet connection at some point. A line gets cut down the street, a storm rolls through, equipment fails. The outage itself usually isn’t the problem. The problem is the hour everyone spends figuring out what to do.
In my work overseeing managed IT and phone services at DirecTech Connect, the businesses that ride out an outage are the ones that answered a few questions before it happened.
1. Where do your phone calls go when the internet is down? If your phones run over the internet, they stop when it does, unless you’ve set up a failover. Most business phone systems can automatically send calls to cell phones or another location when the office goes offline. Find out whether yours does, and test it.
2. Do you have a second way online? A backup connection from a different provider, or even a cellular backup, can keep card payments, scheduling and email running. It doesn’t need to be fast. It needs to be separate from your main line.
3. Who do you call, and what will they ask you? Write down the provider’s support number and your account number, and tape it near the equipment. You don’t want to be searching for it on a phone with no Wi-Fi.
4. Which work can’t stop, and what’s the manual fallback? If you take payments, book appointments or dispatch crews, decide ahead of time how that gets done for a few hours without your usual tools. A paper list and a charged phone count.
5. Who is in charge of telling customers? A short message on your voicemail greeting and your Google listing goes a long way. Decide who updates them, and make sure they know how.
None of this takes long. An hour of planning on a normal Tuesday saves a lot of scrambling when your connection finally goes down.
Danielle Lemons is Vice President of Operations at DirecTech Connect, a Nashville provider of business phone systems, managed IT services, websites and digital marketing. More about Danielle.
