In part one of this two-part series, we discussed the importance of hiring an answering service with a disaster recovery plan in place in case of severe weather like hurricanes, tornadoes or other natural disasters.
It’s vital that your business continue to have a representative available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week through troubling times for your customers — your answering service has to be able to deliver.
At Answering Service Care, we have over four decades of experience with answering all sorts of calls, but we didn’t get there without a plan. Our disaster plan is comprehensive and has allowed us to stay open for the last 40+ years without significant interruption. Beyond having a geographically separate facility located 3,300 miles away to handle overflow in case of an outage at our main site, we’ve put some serious thought into keeping our building open and your business flowing as usual.
Preparing For Potential Disasters at Answering Service Care
Our Margate, Florida headquarters has seen its share of hurricanes and tropical storms, but that has only made us exceptionally good at dealing with disaster. We operate out of two separate buildings that are individually equipped to provide redundant systems that keep your calls flowing.
Each facility is located in a CAT 4-rated structure with CAT 4-rated storm windows and doors, meaning that our structure can withstand wind speeds of up to 155 miles per hour. We’ll be standing even if the utilities come down around us. That’s why we have an onsite UPS and generators that are inspected quarterly and started once a month to ensure that they’re working properly.
Our Margate Data Center is designed with multiple redundancies in place to ensure that your phone calls continue to come in uninterrupted, even if one of our buildings is disabled. Your data is protected by resilient off-site backups, and our critical systems are also built on redundancy principals to prevent sudden computer failure.
Answering Service Care Employees Are Part of the Plan
It’s one thing to have a building that’s hurricane-resistant and systems that are designed to stay running no matter what happens outside, but if we have no one manning the phones, it’s all for naught. That’s why our employees are a big part of our hurricane protocol.
As soon as a hurricane warning is issued, we offer our staff an hourly bonus incentive at no cost to our clients to help man our secure facilities. Not only do they earn extra pay, but they’re encouraged to bring their families so they don’t have to worry if their children or spouse is safe while the winds are howling outside. During an emergency, we’re prepared with plenty of food and water to keep everybody well fed and comfortable.
Because of the hurricane protocols we’ve carefully designed over the decades in our facility, we’re now able to support full operations for 10 days without any outside power, water or gasoline for our generators. Even if we’re unable to continue operations for any reason in the Margate center, our Washington State team is ready to take over all the calls coming into the answering service until our Florida headquarters are back online.
When your business is of critical importance to your customers and you absolutely cannot afford downtime for any reason, you need an answering service with a detailed disaster protocol in place. With proper preparation and plenty of built-in redundancy, you’ll find that your company continues to run seamlessly no matter what kind of weather threatens.
