Terrorism, climate change, pandemics and the interconnected nature of the modern world are forcing business leaders to re-think their strategies for corporate resilience. Responsible business managers are seeking new ways to minimise the impact of the unexpected — from everyday incidents, such as floods and fire, to the more severe such as terrorism, pandemics or the increasingly disruptive weather patterns caused by global warming.

While communication is at the heart of every business, it is often the IT systems and applications that are seen as the lifeblood of business, and which are most exposed to risk in an emergency. And although organisations make significant investment to secure their data and business applications, they often focus less on their essential voice services, perhaps the most important IT service of all.

Prepare for disruptive events

Business continuity and disaster recovery planning are fundamental to the well-being of any organisation. There are many unexpected or even commonplace events that may deny staff access to the office; fire, flood or security alerts can turn off the oxygen of the business — taking customer calls. The critical lifeblood of any organisation is voice — being able to make and receive calls. With BT SmartNumbers, customers get the same familiar service even when the business is undergoing significant disruption.

A familiar voice calms a crisis

Many businesses rely on mobiles or simple call divert for voice continuity. But mobiles are often reserved for the emergency services during a crisis and unlike landlines are susceptible to prolonged power failure. A reliance on mobiles, or simple network diversion, will also lose departmental numbers, hunt groups, fax and call centre services. None of these solutions alone ensure that the customer will get a familiar voice in a crisis — critical to ensuring the impact is minimised.

Minimise the impact on revenue and reputation

BT SmartNumbers provides voice continuity for all your staff — not the chosen few. You avoid the cost of building redundant assets such as a mothballed call centre and your business continuity planning needs to make no assumptions on where your evacuated staff will be. Your arrangements need to react to events from ‘bugs to bombs’. When a disaster occurs, staff can pull calls to wherever they are; a temporary office or even at home. Normal service is restored more cheaply and much more rapidly, minimising the impact on revenue and reputation. The service is available on BT OneBill for clarity and control over billing.

Demonstration

Find out more by watching the 5 minute demonstration on BT Voice Continuity Directed Recovery.