Keeping phone numbers live in a crisis

Gtele.com has sold disaster recovery and work-from-home phone systems for years, but in the lead-up to the Covid-19 pandemic, we never imagined we’d have to put our own business continuity plans to the test. 

In March 2020, we closed our office and sent everyone home to work from a safe environment, confident that our international phone number platform would keep us running. Our customers could still call us, we could access our billing and CMS systems remotely, and we stayed connected internally with frequent Microsoft Teams calls. 

When disaster recovery stopped being theoretical 

March 2020 brought the highest volume of change requests we’ve ever seen. We were flooded with calls, emails and texts from customers asking us to reroute their phone numbers to staff working from home or on mobile phones. 

One customer’s call traffic spiked from around 100 calls a month to over 10,000 a day. This was an extreme case, and volumes dropped back to normal after 2 weeks, but during that period, every call had to be delivered into a call centre that could handle the surge. Their international phone numbers and disaster recovery routing made that possible. 

Making international phone numbers work harder 

When we provide an international phone number, we know it can be routed to any location globally – quickly and reliably. We can also build disaster recovery into the number itself so that, if there’s an outage or an office closure, calls automatically fail over to another destination. 

Because our platform is designed for business continuity, we can: 

• Add call queuing when lines get busy 

• Route calls to different teams, offices or home workers in seconds 

• Keep customers dialling the same number, with no visible disruption 

In short, we’re in the fortunate position of knowing how to make our phone numbers work hard for us, and most importantly, for our customers. 

Planning your own phone number disaster recovery 

It’s been challenging keeping every customer live while changing the routing on most of their numbers, and we expect another wave of changes as restrictions relax and working patterns shift again. 

If you’d like to explore how disaster recovery, intelligent call routing and international phone numbers can help your business stay reachable – whether your teams are in the office, in a call centre or working from home – please get in touch with us. 

Stay safe.