I often hear commercials on the radio from telephone companies, aimed at businesses, saying: “Why stay with the phone company you’re currently with? Don’t you hate how often your phones are down and you’re losing business? Switch to us, and you’ll hardly ever lose your phone service!”
I used to think that these ads were simply trying to scare people into switching companies. But I was recently talking with the computer guys at a certain company, and they remarked that a surprising amount of their time is spent dealing with phone outages.
Is it really true that this is a big problem for businesses in general? My home service is never out; why would it be different for businesses? Is there something about designing a system to have many extensions on a small number of phone lines, that makes them prone to failure? I don’t get it.
Where I work the phones go down about 1 time per month but usually it’s only for 15-30 minutes. Not sure if that is typical or not. I think we have a cheap system if that mattters.
Many businesses, even fairly small ones often have 5-10 line systems with voicemail and some fairly advanced routing features controlled by computers in the building. The phone lines to the building are most likely not down, its the internal system.
I have had ENORMOUS problems with AT&T but it’s the phone line that dies out, not a computerized glitch.
Four times in the last year and a half, my dial tone has just stopped. It always takes a minimum of 4 days to dispatch someone. Funny 'cause every time, he comes in, says “Yep it’s dead.” Plugs in his phone into the switch in the back of the building and says “Yep it’s dead,” then climbs up a pole for like 30 seconds, does something there and says “OK it’s fixed.”
You do have to watch the business. I was the manager of a call center when we went to computers in 1997. We talked to a lot of phone companies and their big selling point was, “If there is a problem in your phone lines, we can divert your phone number(s) to an alternate place, never lose business.” We went with a company and sure enough our lines went down. It took them LESS than five minutes to switch over the lines to our NYC office (we were in Chicago).
Here’s the funny part, that we never thought of, once the lines in Chicago were back up and running it took them over a WEEK to switch us BACK. And sure enough our agreement said they could take up to one week to switch BACK.
That was bad, we had to send everyone home for a week, all those people lost money and the NYC office had to hire temps to cover the volume.