Communication Challenges When Your Business is Interrupted by a Disaster

What many organizations are facing is the need to contact all employees, venders, and clients while not having either access to their building or data systems or both. Two communication techniques are suggested as a solution: 1) A Call Bridge; 2) A Call Tree.  A Call Bridge is a third party service that provides your organization with a designated phone number and access code.  The Call Tree is a predetermined call list which designates who will call whom in the event of a business interruption.  In the case of employees, a call order is determined for each employee and can be performed across several points of communication involving phones and e-mails.  In the case of vendors, customers, and stakeholders, and staff are assigned based upon the relationship. This may require some planning if a plan doesn’t exist.  Vendors and stakeholders are prioritized based upon whether communication following a business interruption is essential, important, or less important.

With the power outage, you may be in need of a remote phone system failover such as a Virtual PBX.  There are web based products out there that provide an instant, automatic failover where calls can be routed to cell phones, phones in branch offices, or home phones.  There is one product that I recommend which does that and provides an audio conference room and hotline messaging for employees, vendors, and customers.  I can provide information on the base system for this very affordable resource.