FEMA suggests that individuals should be prepared to be self-sufficient for at least three days in case of a disaster, but how do you prepare your business? Severe weather, power outages, or just the year 2020, all can have a major impact on your ability to run your business. In case of emergencies, you want to make sure that you and your staff have a plan in place to quickly react if, or when, a disaster strikes.
An answering service creates a centralized communication channel for you, your employees, and your clients to communicate and coordinate in difficult times. Our disaster response answering service can be a simple way to ensure that regardless of the crisis, be it power outages, flooding, or killer bees, you are able to communicate with your staff and clients.
Preparing for an Emergency
Being prepared for a crisis is for more than peace-of-mind. While having plans in place are important to reduce fear and anxiety for you, your staff, and customers, it can also reduce the impact of a disaster or crisis on your business and your relationships with clients. Having an emergency plan in place with an answering service means that agents have already been trained on the needs of your business. Based on your instructions, agents can be trained to effectively handle your calls, where and who to patch calls to, and what information to disseminate to your clients. Having a plan ready before an emergency means eliminating another stressful situation when you, your team, and your customers may already be in crisis.
During an Emergency
A challenge for many answering services is that their agents are based within a short radius to each other. At WESP Communications, we have access to over 30 call center locations all over the country, which allows for redundancies that are necessary when a large disaster event has occurred. The last thing you want is to activate your service, only to find out that they have been affected too! WESP safeguards your service so that if one center is affected, your client calls are rerouted to unaffected sites. This allows for uninterrupted service to every one of our clients. Our coverage system ensures that we have your business covered, regardless of the crisis. Whether your team requires 24/7 live agent coverage, automated coverage, or a combination of both, WESP is ready to support you.
After an Emergency
Once you and your staff are ready to return to regular business operations, you can get back to work knowing your customers have received excellent customer service and you have maintained those important client relationships. WESP can continue to schedule and confirm appointments, and update on-call information so your streams of income are not impacted long-term. Part of our job is to make sure that when you are ready to return to full manpower, we make the transition back as seamless as possible.
