Phones are the main lifelines for many businesses, and in many ways phones are the primary method of communicating with customers, partners, and suppliers and among employees.
Most businesses still rely on premises-based PBX systems or service from the phone company. And while that seems like it would be reliable and resilient, unexpected events like natural disasters and human accidents can take your phone system down for hours, days, even weeks. This results in big opportunities lost for businesses because people can’t get a hold of you.
According to the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), 40% of small businesses go out of business when faced with an unplanned disruption. All it takes is a few inches of flood water, a car to crash into a power pole, or a gas leak in your building or a neighboring site, and your business could experience a phone system outage that could last days or even weeks.
Let’s say the business does survive, but how much did the downtime cost? The Disaster Recovery Preparedness Council found that 38.3% of businesses lost up to $20,000 due to losing critical IT services (like phones) or data in 2014, with 10% losing up to $100,000 and 19.6% losing more than $50,000 to over $5 million.