It been something I have been wondering about for a long time. Why do IT companies still have the answering service? Is it worth all that money just to have a glorified human answering machine take a call and then start dialing down a list of numbers from a word document? There are a ton of ways to get the very important message to your team or escalate the alert from whatever the system is right?
Let’s say a call comes in and then has to be routed to someone outside of normal business hours. Do you have an on-call tech rotation? How do you schedule your team out? What happens if the person who is on-call doesn’t answer? How do you get the message to the next person in line and then the next and next until someone responds?
Here at BVoIP while we strive to have live 24/7 support we are not quite there yet. We use an on-call schedule like many tech firms who staff a help desk do. In order to make sure after hour messages get where they need to go we use a cool integration that allows us to automate notifications of voicemails that come into our phone system and then need to get dispatched to our team. If the on-call person doesn’t respond within a certain amount of time the system will escalate based on our predefined list and schedule. Does this sound like something you can use for your tech team?
On another note, being in the IT or MSP business you are bound to have several tools, systems, and monitors in place for several different reasons. Hopefully, you have made the investment into a true RMM (Remote Monitoring & Management) platform and are using that centralized system to keep an eye on things for you. The question then comes, what happens when said RMM system picks up a critical issue outside of normal business hours? Maybe a server is down? Maybe an ISP is down? Maybe there is a hard drive failure that is imminent?
Critical alerts also need attention outside of normal hours. Here at BVoIP we use the same notification platform to help us escalate important messages from many different systems to our on-call tech staff based on a schedule. Very similar to how we distribute after hours’ messages that come into our phone system we create an entirely different schedule based on our network admin team with it’s own escalation tree.
Don’t let the wrong tools make your life harder. Work more efficiently and save time and money in the process!
