Do you have a great product or service that customers are clamoring for? What happens if business operations halt for an extended period of time? Business continuity planning is critically important yet how many companies actually do it?
Instead of being blind sided by disaster equip your work force with cloud based collaboration tools that will keep them productive at work or from home during times of disaster or “business as usual”. Don’t be fooled by the marketing of the de-facto standard everyone clamored to when disaster first struck. Recognize that good tools may be available on your current VoIP system or invest in a VoIP system that has tools integrated in. A third party video conferencing tool will not be nearly as beneficial as an integrated web conferencing tool tied to your company chat, phone system and voicemail. You will likely pay more for a third party tool than you will to activate licensing on a VoIP system.
An integrated collaboration tool offers several benefits:
- Your workforce will be able to quickly shift to home offices or other work spaces with little impact on your customers.
- Depending on the type of business you run, it’s possible to operate successfully even if all employees work from home for weeks or months. Some businesses, such as Twitter, are allowing their employees to work from home permanently.
- You’ll be able to protect your business from future disasters and avoid the initial stress and ramp-up time required for a shift from business premises to home office.
Remote conferencing feel like the wild west at times, with all kinds of activities and sounds happening in the background that distract from the meeting at hand. An integrated solution such as GotoConnect, RingCentral or others offers managed tools that let the meeting host mute/un-mute specific participants and even hide video of participants. While in a meeting, an employee can click a button to share their desktop to demo an application or show a presentation. The same applies to files which are easy to share. Employees can message each other individually or as a group. Converting from old, outdated or legacy hardware or phones systems can reduce IT staff burden and save your business money by reducing capex costs. Hosted VoIP and hosted conferencing are offered as predictable recurring opex costs which can scale up or down as needed.
