True story: So you make the decision to move your business phone system to Voice over IP (Voip). You select a Voip vendor (Speakeasy/Megapath in this case), and get the phones installed and configured. Things have been running smoothly for more than a year.
Today, however, you discover that your phone system is down — no calls coming in or out. You check the Internet and it’s running. There’s been no power outages. No problem, you look up the support telephone number for your Voip vendor from Outlook and call them. But you are greated with an immediate message, something like this: “We are unable to handle your call. Please try again later”.
So, now what do I do? A quick email to your Voip sales rep for help, and pray that he/she will respond quickly. They do. Turns out there was a global outage, and it not only affected customers, but it also affected the support department!
What is the lesson learned? Always, always, always identify a backup (alternative) to critical functions in your business.
Your disaster recovery plan may say: in case of a phone system failure, call the Voip vendor’s support center. But what’s the alternative if you cannot reach the Support center? In this case, fortunately, we had the sales rep phone# and email address also documented.