PBX-Change

What is your actual loss when your office phones go down – even for a few hours?  On the surface, it may seem like a minor inconvenience – but what is it really costing your company?

I read an article recently, which was the inspiration behind this thought, that broke down collective loss of downtime from companies all across the US and the numbers were in the 100s of billions.  Whether you are a small/medium size professional office or large call center, The Cost Of Downtime is affected by several different aspects and starts to add up quickly.

First and foremost, productivity – when your phone network is down, you are essentially paying your employees “E” to sit around and wait for a resolution.  Remote users lose connection to the office and some employees even stop working entirely so they can address the phone outage, wait on hold with the provider, spend their time troubleshooting the outage.  So, take the rate you are paying each employee in your office and multiply by the number of hours you are down.  Ouch!

The second and most apparent is the loss in revenue “R” – but on a much deeper level.  In addition to the immediate loss in revenue from the inability to make calls and new business trying to call you, also consider all the money spent to drive these phone calls to your office.  Did you spend money on advertising?  What about digital marketing/SEO performance?

Finally, and most importantly, the customer/client “C”.  A patient trying to call your office for directions?  A client trying to call with an urgent support issue?  What about that conference call for a closing scheduled at 10?  With all the advancements in the channels of communication in the business world, your office phones are still the lifeblood of the organization and when you customers/clients cannot reach you it can have a significant impact on that relationship.