Prepare your Business before Coronavirus infects it!

Corona Virus 2019 (COVID-19) will have a deeper impact on your work than you realize – Do You Have It Figured Out?

There are a lot of unknowns surrounding the coronavirus. Social media hype and misinformation propagation make a bad situation worse.  So, let’s start with a couple of knowns:

1. An individual can be contagious for 2 to10 days before they show any symptoms.
2. A vaccine for COVID-19 is at least 9 to 18 months away and test kits are still not freely available.

What does that mean?

You don’t really know who does and doesn’t have the virus, including yourself, so how do you control the spreading?  The only way to contain the Coronavirus is a LOCK DOWN.  Governments are now realizing the sooner the better.  And, at the time of writing this article, that’s what China, HongKong, South Korea, Italy, France, and Spain had to do. Everyone has to stay at home.

So, your business must function effectively with everyone working from home – every employee being distributed in a different physical location! If you already support telecommuting for certain functions, then you’re already set. What if you don’t and what about the functions, like customer support, finance, HR, etc. that don’t telecommute. Manufacturing companies, of course, will need to invest to keep their production lines going through daily screening, sanitation, and are beyond the scope of this particular discussion.

Do your IT systems support a distributed virtual company, everyone working remotely? ERP systems, CRMs, Phones/Voice?

Let’s take a look at voice communications – it covers internal calls, meetings, customer facing calls, customer meetings, etc. We’ll cover CRMs later.

Does your voice service support internal person to person calling?  How about always-on conference rooms, i.e., can you click a button, or dial a room number and be in a voice conference room?  And remember, not everyone has high bandwidth home connections to support video, so it’s just got to be voice. You can’t relegate everybody to just text chatting with one another, and clearly not productive for carrying on a discussion.

Can customers call your business and get to the correct person when they are sitting at home?  What about internal team calls?  Can you distribute, coordinate and escalate calls and issues with everyone remote?

What about friendly VoiceBots for simple customer inquiries and questions?  How about outbound calling VoiceBots to remind or notify your customers?  (Not talking about a recorded message, talking about a personalized call with specific and unique information about your customer).

Apparently, can you work from home and receive customer calls, make customer calls, make internal calls, attend internal conference calls, and can this all be coordinated and tracked when required?  Can you see who’s available, who’s online? Can you have adhoc discussions internally and even with customers?

If not, you need to work towards these objectives starting now.

If you have any questions or would like more information on how to rapidly and cost effectively roll out a distributed a cloud-based global voice system, please reach out to us at Sales@MetroGuild.com.  We’re happy to assist.