Many organizations are constantly evaluating risks to their business and determining what steps can be taken to mitigate that risk, which comes under the umbrella of Business Continuity planning. Effective communications during any kind of crisis is a key part of a business continuity plan.

Depending on the crisis, your current communications system may not be able to handle the various crisis situations.

Unity Connected Solutions has created an inexpensive Business Continuity package based on our cloud based solution called Unity Connect. As a redundant cloud-based system, Unity Connect is not directly impacted by geographic climate issues such as flood, fire, snow or ice storms. As part of the Business Continuity package, Unity works with clients to pre-configure the system and then have it on standby to be quickly brought into action when needed.

Planning what should happen during a crisis or disaster will ensure the most effective response. Simply relying on documentation alone, is not sufficient to set up emergency communication plans. Unity will work with organizations to determine exactly how calls are to be handled during an emergency.

We work with you to define and set up the automated attendant, an IVR, if required to route specific calls, SIP trunk channels and standard voice mail greetings.  We can help create the basic instructions to be distributed to your team, when they need to use the Business Continuity system as well as define the protocol to initiate forwarding from the current lines to the Business Continuity system.

At such a time that the business continuity system is required, you will follow the protocol, as defined in Step 1, to forward your Telco lines to the Unity Connect system.

At this point, you may require additional users on the system, and can contact Unity Connected Solutions to expand the number of users your Unity Connect instance can support.

Users can be directed to the MyUnityConnect website to download clients and how to use their system.

When people work home they will likely be using their laptop with a WebRTC client. The sound quality of laptop speakers and microphones is poor.  It is impossible to manage background noise. If on a lot of calls, this is far from ideal.

We recommend using a headset. They can be USB or Wireless (bluetooth), some will work on laptops and mobile phones.

We supply Jabra headsets. Ask about headset options for at-home working.

Unity Connect supports a wide variety of SIP (VoIP) telephone handsets. These handsets can easily be used at home, if needed, for staff that make or receive a lot of calls and would feel more comfortable using a phone than a laptop.

It does take time to order and pre-configure telephone handsets, so that they can be easily used later. If you think you want to use handsets, make sure this is discussed in Step 1, as they will need to be ordered and configured and shipped to you and safely stored until needed.