With winter and snowstorms around the corner, businesses need to prepare for potential power outages. If your call center or brick-and-mortar locations stay open no matter the weather, you don’t want to miss the extra business.
Use Your Mobile Phone
Since a power outage is typically local, your VoIP server is still up and running. Meaning, you’re getting calls, you’re just not hearing the phone ring because the power is out.
Solve this problem quickly by forwarding all calls to a mobile line that someone can answer while the power is out. You can also have all calls routed to a voicemail box. Your VoIP provider dashboard will have a place to setup the emergency phone number and voicemail during an outage.
Don’t forget the app
If you download Viirtue’s app, you will never miss a call – whether the power goes out or you just walk away from your desk. Since our service has never gone down (yes, even during hurricanes!), all of your calls will ring through the app, so you never miss a minute.
Backup Power Supply
Your phones aren’t the only thing to worry about during a power outage. Your routers, modems, and servers will go down, too, leaving employees without WIFI even if they’re able to answer a phone call.
Connecting every device to a battery backup power supply will solve most of your problems, at least for a few minutes. If you’re working on a project when everything goes dark, you could lose all of your work. Those battery backup minutes will give you enough time to save everything before shutting down during the outage.
If you face the possibility of days without power, you might consider a generator for your facility. If your team doesn’t need to work in the office, this would be overkill (they can work through the app anywhere with internet). However, if your work requires employees on-site, you should consider installing a generator before the weather gets bad!
What You Need to Stay Running
Fortunately, routers and modems take up very little battery power. Many battery backups tell you how long they will last without electricity, sometimes 10 minutes “full power” or up to 6 hours. “Full power” refers to something like a computer plugged in and running, so your phones, modems, and routers will use less power and the time will last longer than other devices.
Plan Ahead
When companies transition from landlines to VoIP, many times they don’t realize the new challenge with power outages. However, the VoIP provider often has redundancies in place to keep your internet service up, even during natural disasters or big snowstorms, and you should make similar preparations.
Setting up forwarding voicemail boxes and cell phone numbers will only take a few minutes, and all employees should have the app downloaded on their own phones. These quick solutions will hold you over until you install to a battery backup or a generator.
Viirtue uses geographically diverse data centers across the country to maintain service in case one facility has a power outage. That means if we lose power due to a hurricane in Florida, another location will take over seamlessly. And you will never know.