Include Your Telephone Answering Service as Part of Your Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery Planning

In today’s world, the words Business Continuity and Disaster Planning are (or should be) part of your everyday business vocabulary and your overall business plan.

Incorporating your telephone answering service as part of your plan shows foresight and caring – both for your employees and your business.

Here are some ideas:

1.  Sign up for a telephone answering service to attain an unique DID (direct in dial) number

2.  Make sure you also sign up for message delivery options that make sense for your location, your business and your employees:  these message options can take the form of direct patching, texting, pager notification, and others.

3.  Design a script that includes contact names, numbers, and instructions – the agents at your telephone answering service will handle these calls in a professional, courteous, and friendly manner (hint:  telephone answering services who provide a great deal of medical answering services are already geared toward taking urgent calls and know how to provide calm service in the face of panic.)

3.  Distribute the DID number to your employees for use if a disaster occurs

4.  Identify your key personnel who are in charge of organizing and executing your disaster recovery and/or business continuity plans

5.  Identify to your telephone answering service those individuals who will receive the messages from your employees

6.  Keep that list current with your answering service

The steps outlined above sound pretty basic, and they are.  It’s not a hard, or costly service to implement, and can save a lot of time and worry.  Your employees call in, leave their status information (are they okay and is their family okay), their location, and if unable to take a return call from your key personnel, can pick up further instructions via two-way messaging – this will require some programming on the part of your telephone answering service, but it can be done.

This way your key personnel can account for your employees, and ensure all are okay, all receive instructions as to what to do next to get their lives up and running again and get your business up and running again.

Your telephone answering service can act as the primary plan, or as a secondary, backup plan.

We all try to make sure we have plans in place, just in case, enlisting a telephone answering service that operates 24/7, 365 days a year to help with your plans can only help you and your employees…just in case….

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