We’ve sold disaster recovery working from home systems for years. Never thought we would have to implement them on ourselves!

So in March 2020 we closed our office and sent everyone home to work from a safe environment. Safe in the knowledge that our business wouldn’t change. Our customers can still call us, we can assess our billing and CMS systems and have frequent internal calls using Microsoft Teams.

When we provide a phone number (anywhere in the world) we know that the number provided can be routed to any location globally and that this work can be completed quickly. We can even build disaster recovery on a number so that this kind of routing happens automatically if there is an outage. March 2020 saw the highest amount of change requests we have ever seen. Calls, emails and texts from customers asking us to route phone numbers to their staffs homes or mobile phones. One customers call traffic spiked from 100 calls a month to over 10,000 a day – This was an extreme case and the call traffic returned to normal after 2 weeks (but the calls had to get sent into a call centre for that period). 

We are lucky in a way – we know how to make our phone numbers work hard for us. If we’re busy we can add call queuing. If our office closes we can re route the calls in a flash and our customers are none the wiser. It has been a challenge this month keeping our customers live and changing most of the routing on all their numbers and we expect to go through it again when the restrictions are relaxed. Until then please let us know if you want to make your phone number work harder for you and stay safe.