Pandemic Answering Service

Answering Service Offers Disaster Recovery Tips For Coronavirus-Affected Businesses

The COVID-19 pandemic has caused havoc in daily business routines. Making sure you are there for your customers and maintaining open communication channels with them is essential; whether your company is classified as such or not. The safety and health of your team members is a top priority, so you begin to expand the workplace to the homes of your staff. Now, with your customers and staff working outside of their normal space, are you able to effectively keep a finger on the pulse of customer communication and needs? Answering Service Care has been an award-winning leader in the answering service industry for over 45 years. During these difficult times, we want to reassure business owners that our team of Smiling Faces remains here, 24/7, ready to serve their business and their customers. Our 45+ years of experience and business continuation planning have effectively prepared us for disasters such as COVID-19.

Epidemic Countermeasures for Businesses

The key to being prepared for a disaster of any kind, whether it be a weather event, shooting, cyber attack or an infectious disease outbreak, is to plan ahead. Take careful steps to understand how to react to emergencies; safety is essential, technological and operational redundancies are critical.

How to keep your employees and yourself safe in the event of an emergency?
What steps, if any, should be taken to avoid the loss of assets, inventory, or other property?
Who will be contacted first? The authorities? Your security team, if you have one? Yourself, if you are off site? All other essential or emergency contacts?
What steps are needed to engage to ensure essential systems and business processes run through and post emergency?

It’s not enough simply to have a plan. Your employees should understand the plan and the responsibilities they will have to execute the protocols. Train them on different scenarios. A fire drill is the most common example of disaster training.

Get Your Business Up and Running Again

Your goal should be to resume operations as soon as is safe and practical following a disaster. Businesses, especially small businesses, that take longer to reopen after a catastrophe often fail within a year, according to FEMA. A business continuity plan should contain:

A business impact analysis (BIA) — this will already have been carried out before the disaster occurs. This analysis scrutinizes the effects of a disaster on your business. Different disruptions will have different impacts, of course. Will the timing of a disruption affect operations in a particular way? A fire at a school during the summer vacation will have a much smaller impact than a fire during the school day in February.
Recovery strategy — referencing your BIA, you need to identify the resources required to mitigate the impact of a disaster. Do you need duplicates of important records, or data backups?
Plan development — your DR plan needs a framework, which means assigning responsibilities to different team members, codifying recovery procedure, and establishing what you will do in the event of loss of mission critical IT infrastructure (frequently one of the first things to go down in the event of a disaster).
Testing — if your plan is untested, it is a very flimsy plan. Your plan must be tested in order to identify and tweak weaknesses. When you re-test and find that your business can quickly resume operations, that is how you know your DR plan is more secure.

Coronavirus Shutdown Protocols

A public health crisis such as the COVID-19 pandemic is to be taken seriously. You should establish protocols for telecommuting (your workforce working from home), if that is possible. How will they handle incoming calls, or meetings, or essential monitoring of IT infrastructure? Luckily, Answering Service Care is on hand to provide help companies with business continuation.

“We have taken steps to prepare for the challenging days ahead,” says Answering Service Care CEO Michael Shooster. “While our systems are designed to handle in excess of a million calls a month it’s our people that may be impacted working in our offices across the country as the virus spreads. Circumstances like this require special consideration. So as an extra precaution we are taking steps so that we are able to maintain continuity. We have increased our remote operations by extending the workplace to the majority of our employee’s homes. The resources that remain in our offices are practicing social distancing and promoting the CDC Guidelines for Good Hygiene. A happy, confident and healthy team at ASC is the key to providing quality solutions to our clients.”

“Our hearts go out to all of those who have been affected by COVID-19.” he adds.

Remote Answering Service for Disaster and Outbreak Relief

Answering Service Care provides a 24/7 live answering service that can cover offices forced to close. Businesses will know that their potential customers’ queries are being dealt with at all times of the day. Our representatives offer live scheduling, call transfers, and assisting customers in other ways. In the event of a viral outbreak, unlike call centers our staff can work remotely and continue phone coverage for our clients. If the communities to which small businesses belong are affected by coronavirus, and their operations are compromised, Answering Service Care will be there for them to help them continue on, keeping callers satisfied and supported in spite of hazards.

About Answering Service Care: The family-owned business Answering Service Care has provided bilingual, US-based operators to staff clients’ phone lines 24/7 since 1974.

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We are still in the initial set up process with Answering Service Care. Our representative, Kevin Haas, is helping to make this transition seamless so far. I like his “We can do that!” attitude as he brings our dental office on board with his services.

Very impressive and professional. As I told Michael Diaz one of the main reasons we went with this service was due to his follow up.

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In business since 1974, Answering Service Care is a true leader in the industry. We’d like to show you – and your callers – just why this is. We don’t outsource, we are fully-U.S.-based and we offer bilingual answering service options, among many other reasons. We believe in technology, and we believe in people, too. Call today at (800) 430-6511 or send us a message.

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